Afterword: The past, present and future of sociotechnical systems theory

The concept of mining modernisation has become topical in the quest for sustainable mining, and environmental, social and governance (ESG) requirements. This is not surprising considering modernisation's important role in the current context of the 4th and anticipated 5th industrial revolutions. A mining company's success, competitiveness and sustainability largely hinges on its ability to proactively envision the future mine and plan an implementation pathway now rather than passively responding to its inevitable unfolding. Although the application of digital transformation has seen a slow, but steady uptake in the mining value chain, progress has largely been much slower in the stakeholder engagement space. This has been observed across the mining industry regardless of geographic location despite stakeholder engagement's central role in securing a social licence to operate. Much of the debate has focused on whether stakeholder engagement delivers a social licence to operate, and on the various stakeholder mapping and engagement frameworks. The fundamental aim of this review is to map the digital transformation of the mineral industry with a specific focus towards understanding how stakeholder engagement practices could be integrated in a mine's modernisation strategy to deliver a social licence to operate. In particular, we address: (a) the slow, but steady uptake of technology with potentially adverse effects on stakeholders, such as mining mechanisation, high underground pumping capabilities, and digital exploration; (b) how an understanding of responsible mine modernisation could influence the way the industry deploys people-centric technology for sustainability; (c) how considering stakeholder engagement as network building provides a valuable lens to understand digital transformation for social licence; (d) the promise of responsibly modernised engagement practises for the future mine; and (e) implications of responsibly modernised stakeholder engagement on skillsets of the future. Combining these topics effectively creates a stable mining network, thereby significantly reducing conflicts in mining ecosystems. Technology transformation in the mining value network will be more successful and sustainable if it does not lose sight of the need for a robust integrative stakeholder engagement approach.

The rail industry in Great Britain has faced unprecedented demand for its services in the past decade, whilst addressing technological transformation, and with multiple objectives in relation to safety and performance. Systems theories seems to offer solutions for these challenges, but there has been little research on how rail organisations can establish processes and build resilience during periods of significant change that are complementary with this type of theoretical approach. This paper investigated senior business leaders’ perspectives of how systems thinking is, or could be, applied in organisational design, system change and risk management. Twenty-five interviews were carried out with senior executives and managers in the railway industry. These interviews were designed to explore the perceptions of these people in policy setting and senior management roles and what they see as barriers to change within a dynamic, fast moving, industry. This included exploring both the ‘work as imagined’ in the corporate strategy and company procedures, as well as their understanding of ‘work as done’. Two national change programmes that affect the frontline rail engineering workforce have been used as contexts to frame consultations within this study. The results identify some important points to consider for the design of change in a complex industry, and how a socio-technical system framework or model might be applied in practice.

Complex socio-technical systems pose considerable challenges to requirements elicitation due to dynamic boundary conditions and conflicting perspectives. Traditional requirements engineering is criticized for its failure in providing a systemic view, overlooking ethical concerns and marginalized social perspectives. It is argued that educational institutions as a part of society need to ethically develop and manage their academic processes and consider such perspectives for emancipation. This critical qualitative research applies the emancipatory systemic methodology of critical systems thinking (CST) for the requirements elicitation of a complex and dynamic university course-timetables management problem. Firstly, the problem is ethically formulated to mitigate Type III errors. Secondly, multiple viewpoints are sought for boundary judgments using a CST-based ethical inquiry of boundary critique to reveal the normative content of the project design, explore imbalances amongst the socio-technical design components, and unveil the underlying ethical issues. The dynamic stakeholder network captures the system's emergence through stakeholder interconnectedness and boundary liquidity by sweeping-in relevant stakeholders through the continuum of various states of the project. This work enlightens requirements engineering by coupling systemic and socio-technical lenses for the elicitation of ethical requirements and the emancipation of marginalized perspectives in complex and dynamic information systems projects in general and timetabling problems, in particular.

The need for a transformation from conventional rainwater drainage systems towards Blue Green Infrastructure systems, designed as open spatial systems for sustainable rainwater management, is acknowledged. However, these systems are viewed as sociotechnical systems and, consequently, this transition has been slow. This paper focuses on the planning processes behind Blue Green Infrastructure projects in Stockholm and analyse them as transition experiments, addressing the question: what challenges and opportunities can be identified to enable the new systems to become a common component of rainwater management practices? Based on a literature review, this paper presents a methodological framework by identifying the key factors for facilitating or blocking sociotechnical change. These cluster around six categories –– context, actors, instruments, processes, outputs and outcomes, and impacts. The paper used the framework to collect data and analyse three urban projects. Stockholm has remarkable strengths associated with moving towards new solutions, in terms of receptive contexts, human agency, space for experimentation, and a collaborative planning culture. However, there is a need for renegotiating the positional power of the actors involved in the planning systems in order to provide opportunities for water professionals to establish a stronger role in fitting the new solutions into the overall landscape, and urban planning processes and goals.

How do complex healthcare systems that are organised into distinct speciality areas achieve effective patient care transitions when patients present with a rare constellation of symptoms that affect multiple body systems? How do these patients challenge existing ways of organising tasks, clinical activities, and interdependent responsibilities? The current study applies a sociotechnical systems perspective to understand how these complex work design and care-related challenges were resolved by the Western Australian Undiagnosed Diseases Program. We conducted a two-year longitudinal, qualitative study of this program, conceived to improve the diagnosis and management of patients with rare, multi-system disorders by piloting a re-design of the local system of diagnostic work. Specifically, we (1) compared the configuration and effectiveness of the old system and the re-designed system; and (2) analysed the process of system re-design (i.e., the design, implementation, and operation of the program) in order to understand the factors that contributed to – or inhibited – its success. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for effectively re-designing complex, trans-organisational work systems.

Like most work systems, the domain of adventure activities has seen a series of serious incidents and subsequent calls to improve regulation. Safety regulation systems aim to promote safety and reduce accidents. However, there is scant evidence they have led to improved safety outcomes. In fact there is some evidence that the poor integration of regulatory system components has led to adverse safety outcomes in some contexts. Despite this, there is an absence of methods for evaluating regulatory and compliance systems. This article argues that sociotechnical systems theory and methods provide a suitable framework for evaluating regulatory systems. This is demonstrated through an analysis of a recently introduced set of adventure activity regulations. Work Domain Analysis (WDA) was used to describe the regulatory system in terms of its functional purposes, values and priority measures, purpose-related functions, object-related processes and cognitive objects. This allowed judgement to be made on the nature of the new regulatory system and on the constraints that may impact its efficacy following implementation. Importantly, the analysis suggests that the new system's functional purpose of ensuring safe activities is not fully supported in terms of the functions and objects available to fulfil them. Potential improvements to the design of the system are discussed along with the implications for regulatory system design and evaluation across the safety critical domains generally.