Work and organization

Many of the papers for this 50(th) anniversary event of the GfA (Society of Ergonomics) deal with macro-ergonomic issues. This demonstrates that the integration of social, and organizational sciences into ergonomics succeeded. From the perspective of ergonomists orientated on engineering and natural sciences this shall not be interpreted as a threat but rather as a significant enrichment of the own area of expertise. By definition work is always a social process since it defines itself by interaction with other people. To abandon these social interactions may be legitimate when testing single displays, tools, working equipment or software tools on usability in a laboratory setting respectively when physical and/or chemical environmental parameters like vibration, illumination, noise or chemical hazardous substances shall be examined in their effect. In the real work situation people interact with one another, they interact with technical environmental conditions, with organizational defaults and with working equipment. For ergonomics it is a challenge to configure these interactions so that the single employee, the staff and the organization in which the interaction takes place, interact with their environment (ecological, social and economical) in a way to assure a sustainable survival of all parties involved. This affects the methods of analysis to be developed, the alignment of work design and the evaluation of the conducted measures respectively of the achieved effects.