My Start at Brunel University

Speaker A I was almost completing a PhD which I was doing at the Land School of Economics and I was doing the PhD on the process of planning in the kibutz. I had been a member for the past 14 years, actually, of a collective settlement. And then I decided to leave and do a doctorate in the LSC and then found myself looking for a job. And it was a choice of Brunel or Enfield at that time. And I knew nothing about anything coming straight out from agricultural background and doing all sorts of different jobs in the cuborts. And I went and met Elliot. Elliot interviewed me and he was incredibly excited about the whole concept of that time of a keyboard and the collective. I didn't realize it but it appealed to him intellectually and conceptually. That what was going on and obviously we got on well. I went for an interview, got the job and became a member of I'm not sure it was called was it bias at the time? I'm not sure. But I joined what was the Social Services Organization research unit. And by the time I joined, I had begun reading up both Wolfie Brown and Elliot Jax's work, and I found it absolutely fascinating. In fact I built it into rewrote part of my dissertation and built the material in to the dissertation in an attempt to understand this very interesting organization called the Kibunts. But it was not merely the concepts because I think a lot of us focus on the time slam or discretion or managerial role which were important at the time. But what appealed to me as well, perhaps as much about Eddie's work was his mixture of theory and practice. Because a lot of the work at the time was either heavily theoretical my own PhD was supervised by one professor from the sociology department of the LSE, another from the government department. And they were continually at loggerheads because one had a highly theoretical approach using words such as role and the other was very much down to earth and concerned about local government and practice and so on. Elliot was able to span that bridge by of theory and practice in a way which absolutely appealed to me because he was a man who placed enormous emphasis on precision of concepts and so I read the book and was thoroughly enchanted by it. Obviously at that time your question was what concepts appealed to me? I think certainly the whole notion of a manager and a managerial role which sounds incredibly simple only to those who know nothing about organizations. But anybody who knows anything about organizations knows how powerful a concept that is. Well, it's a long while ago, I'm going back some 30 years or so but that was certainly one that I tried to use in my own work at the time. In the early days Brunel was and possibly still is a bit of a concrete jungle and we were working in very poor conditions. There were four of us at the beginning. In one room there was Ray for obotam, Stephen Sang, and a fourth chap called John Evans. I don't know if you've made contact with him, but the four of us worked together, and it was just great. I'd been out of academic life for 14 or so years. It was great to be mixing with people who were interested in organizations. I think that's the other thing I ought to say, that I had become incredibly interested in the nature of organizations and how they work or they don't work. I never understood how anything really worked or didn't work. And I spent most of my life trying to understand that and still struggling to understand why some organizations work and some don't. And I found myself sitting next to Rafe at the time, and I know that one of my first jobs I was given was to go away and do a role description of a mental health worker. And I think I was expected to go away and do it in an hour and a half and come back. Instead of which, I spent about two or three weeks with five interviews getting this incredibly detailed role description. And I could see that Rafe was getting more and more agitated that I wasn't producing anything. Finally, he rationalized himself that I was working on a long time span. This was okay, and it was fun. It was exciting. It was fun. And also, I think the other thing is I was working in what was called a social services unit. So the whole concept of social welfare, social services, social policy was very close to my interests. So it was a mixture of the applied work, the conceptual work, and the social services work, all of which was incredibly important. I suppose the other thing to remember is, in those days, and people who are younger may not remember this, it was an incredibly exciting period in British social policy, very optimistic period, where people thought that just about anything could be done, even though there was a Tory government at the time. So it was good to be involved in these projects, and money was no object. We had research funds. The old Department of Health and Social Security funded us, and we had a great time.