The Semiotic Crisis in Contemporary Hospitals

Abstract

The paper which I am about to present has developed from my work during the past year with the Quality of Working Life Unit at McGill University. “Quality of Working Life” (QWL) is an approach to organizational redesign developed at the Tavistock Institute in London by Eric Trist and others during the 1940’s. Its three most basic assumptions are, firstly, that all organizations — be they industrial, educational, governmental, etc. — are open systems sensitive to their changing environments; secondly, that all organizations have two main types of ‘components’, technical and social, both of which must be jointly optimized if the organization is to survive in its environment; and, thirdly, that traditional bureaucratic organizational structures are no longer effective for dealing with our turbulent and rapidly changing social environments.