Tavistock Institute

The Socio-Psychological Perspective

The Tavistock Institute's socio-psychological approach was so labelled because an important shared enterprise at the time was to understand how people—usually without awareness—placed their psychological issues into the social situation in which they found themselves. Through action research, it was possible to study what was being enacted in the social situation, to hypothesize how that enactment might be related to unresolved psychological issues being experienced by the people and to craft social experiments and other system changes intended to clarify and resolve psychological issues. This angle was the mirror opposite of the approach of the Tavistock Institute's sister organization. Post–World War II, the Tavistock Clinic entered the new National Health Service as a psychoanalytically orientated mental health outpatient unit: Its strong innovation at the time was to discover, describe and work with ways in which the social situation contributed to psychological issues. Indeed, several founding members of the Tavistock Institute association maintained some involvement with the clinic as well. However, the interest in psychological issues as being enacted and reinforced in the total social situation resonated with the institute's increasingly diverse associates, comprising sociologists, political scientists, social anthropologists, operations researchers and social psychologists.

Combined with a nascent action research methodology that gathered data from many people within any one social situation, integrated teams of social scientists began to notice multiple and simultaneous influences on human behaviour. They used and taught each other how to use a wide range of concepts from depth psychology to social anthropology, to political science. Such an approach felt both grounded in the reality of the people whom they were trying to help, as well as pointing out unusual ways to change organizational aspects of the social situation in order to address the psychological. The institute found that a simultaneous socio-psychological approach enabled them to understand and contribute to development and change in a wide variety of situations. Here are three examples of influential action research projects with a predominately socio-psychological perspective.

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