Dr Frank Heller, a leading, internationally renowned researcher based for many years at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, died in May this year at the age of 87. He was working at the Institute right up until his death. Frank regarded himself as a social scientist rather than as a psychologist or sociologist, and with good reason. His first qualification was in engineering but he then gained a degree from the London School of Economics in economics and sociology and followed this with an MA in psychology from Birkbeck College. Some years later, after working for several years, he completed his PhD in organisational psychology from London University.
Frank had a truly international outlook, partly as a result of his background and partly because he was a much travelled man. He was born in Vienna but completed his schooling and his university studies in London. After a spell as head of the fledgling Department of Management at the Polytechnic of Central London, he spend several years working for international agencies in South America which he followed with short spells at Berkeley and Stanford before he returned to London and to the Tavistock Institute in 1970. Part of the motivation for this move was a meeting at Stanford with Fred Emery who was then engaged with Einar Thorsrud on the workplace industrial democracy project in Norway. Frank’s major long-term research interest lay in management power and decision-making and the conditions under which influence in decision-making might be shared. He was dubious about the scope for effective workplace participation without the appropriate support from the leadership of the organisation. Most of his major international research stemmed from this interest.
Much of Frank’s work was based on international comparative projects with a range of colleagues who reflected his belief in an integrative social science approach. He had started his international collaboration in the 1960s providing a South American input to Mason Haire’s comparative study of management styles. He subsequently participated in a number of international studies including projects on competence and power in decision-making, on the meaning of work, and perhaps most notably, on industrial democracy in Europe. In each case, an underlying focus was the extent to which sharing decision-making enhanced the quality of decisions and the outcomes for both workers and the organisation. He also developed a distinctive methodological approach which he termed “research action”. This was partly a deliberate attempt to counter a tendency he perceived in some action research to rush to action without any reflective theoretical perspective and without fully engaging the actors in the context. He was therefore a strong advocate, as part of research action in the use of survey feedback methods as a means of checking understanding and also involving survey participants in the research process.
In 2000 Frank, with three of his closest long-term colleagues and friends, George Strauss, Eugen Pusic and Bernhard Wilpert, published Worker’s Participation in Management. This was a scholarly and intellectually rigorous summing up of their decades of research. It was also in many ways a rather sad book in so far as it concluded that the ‘industrial democracy project’ of the second half of the 20th century had largely failed. In effect, Frank’s early analysis had been right; the success of industrial democracy depends on the supportive decisions from those in power in organisations. If this is not forthcoming, and increasingly this appears to be the case, then, in the absence of strong legislation, industrial democracy is unlikely to flourish. Towards the end of his life, Frank had been working on projects concerned with the environment and energy conservation. These included processes for raising awareness of the importance of energy conservation among school-children. This shift towards a focus on more local empowerment perhaps presages one of the processes that is beginning to take a firmer hold in organisation and beyond to maintain the systems of participation, democracy and power sharing that Frank and his colleagues held so dear.
Frank had a prolific research output with over 100 articles and 13 books. His core output was essentially academic but he was also an acute observer of political and social processes and a very regular contributor to the letters columns of the leading UK newspapers. His belief in an integrative social science extended to a recognition of the value of both quantitative and qualitative methods; and the importance of an ethical engaging approach to research found a ready home at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Frank worked closely throughout his life with a wide range of work and organisational psychologists. In the early days, these included Americans such as Lyman Porter and Gary Yukl. In several of his European projects he collaborated closely with leading figures in W/O psychology such as Pieter Drenth and Bernhard Wilpert. Despite this, he was sometimes critical of a narrow psychology perspective, which he saw as potentially too individualistic. He felt that any serious study also had to take account of context, including the role of institutions and power. Nevertheless, Frank was a regular presenter at many W/O conferences around the world; indeed he was to be found presenting his research to a wide range of social science conferences. Through his collaborative projects and his involvement in conferences and other activities he gained a wide circle of international friends. He was always eager to engage in debate, though his humour and humanity always shone through. Among his many friends and colleagues in the social science community and beyond, he will be sadly missed.
By prof. David Guest
King’s College, London,
Council Member, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
(United Kingdom)