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Organization of any kind, from prehistoric hunting societies to companies working through the worldwide web, operate with a distribution of influence and power among their members. This distribution of influence has consequences at three levels: for the people working in the organization, for the organization itself, and, from time to time, for members of society outside the organization. A series of action-and policy-oriented projects on the distribution of influence were developed by or in collaboration with the Centre for Decision Making Studies of The Tavistock Institute over a quarter of a century. They started with a seven-country comparative research on top management decision making, followed by two 12-country studies on Industrial Democracy and a 5-year longitudinal program in seven companies in three countries. These and two longitudinal projects in Britian, one on a motor car manufacturer and the other on an airport, used a similar conceptual framework. The article draws on the evidence from this program of work, describes the evolving theoretical model and concludes that organizational influence sharing appears to have made only limited progress during the last 50 years. Four explanations are put forward: overidealistic expectations; a tendency to ignore the need for certain necessary antecedents, like competence; a tendency to act as if influence sharing is not subject to contingencies like the nature of tasks; and probably most importantly, the almost universal tendency to design influence sharing measures through uncoordinated mechanistic social engineering.

The founders of the sociotechnical model perceived its relevance at the macro level of the community, at the meso level of whole organizations, as well as at the micro level of the primary work systems, but it is at the primary work system that most applications have been carried out. An efficient micro level sociotechnical solution may still cause the technology to have a harmful impact on the environment. An increasing popular awareness of environmental damage due to certain technologies leads one to consider an extension of the Important joint optimization concept to a systemic heuristic device called the socioecotechnical model in which the intra and extra-organizational factors can be jointly assessed and optimized.