Bücher der Reihe International Series on the Quality of Working Life

Norway has therefore a lead in experience compared to most other countries, particu to the United States, where debates and subsequent experiments re larly volving around the quality of working life and the democratization of work started only in the early seventies.

In November 1975, the German Marshall Fund of the United States agreed to support a proposal from the International Council for the Quality of Working Life for study of 'cross-cultural com munication' on developments associated with the quality of work ing life -a shared interest of the fund and the council.

A world scenario centred about the first two scenarios but also aimed to locate within this pattern the most probable future for sets of the smaller societies and under-developed countries.

For the last five ofthose years I have held ajob which has been much concerned with the problems which managers face under these cir cumstances, and I have been in the position to discuss these pro blems with people doing similar jobs in other large organisations, who have in turn often asked me for advice on their problems.

Power, inequality in power, struggle for power are a kind of prime movers in social life, but power problems have seldom been studied, compared to the research done on other subjects, such as satisfaction about personal achievement, perception, mental processes, achievement motivation, cultural differences, etc.

Exploration of the nature of human communication and the media is a pre requisite to any assessment of the likely future role of communications . First, we had the fiasco of social scientists trying to apply Shannon's mathematical theory of information as if it were a theory of human communication.

A rather similar response was obtained when, in the 1950's, an account was given to a manager of the British Coal Board of an autonomous composite team of more than 40 miners, who had taken over complete responsibility for a three-shift cycle, and divided the income obtained among themselves.