ISSUE 182 : Jul/Aug - 2010 - Australian Defence Force Journal

Command and Control: the sociotechnical perspectiveGuy H. Walker, Neville A. Stanton, Paul M. Salmon & Daniel P. JenkinsAshgate: Farnham, UK: 2009ISBN: 978-0-7546-7265-4Reviewed by Flight Lieutenant Travis Hallen, RAAF‘Network centric warfare’ (NCW), or ‘network enabled capability’ as it is referred to in theUK, is the cornerstone of information-age command and control. As a concept, it is a blendof technology and organisational design that seeks to optimise human adaptability. However,despite the quantity of literature devoted to the topic, there has been a distinct absence offocus on some aspects of its human dimension; namely, what the human will do in a NCWenvironment, rather than what they should do.Addressing this aspect of NCW is of vital importance if modern militaries are to capitalise onthe benefits that technology has provided in the area of command and control. Identifying thisgap in the research, four leading academics in the field of ‘human factors integration’ (HFI) setabout transforming the network-enabled human from the mathematically-modelled rationaloptimiser of current literature into a living, breathing and, at times, unpredictable componentof the command and control system. The result is Command and Control: the sociotechnicalperspective.One of the stand-out features is its thorough review of the literature dealing with therelationship between organisational design and effectiveness. Although the book is part ofthe ‘Human Factors in Defence’ series, the authors have not limited themselves to the militaryliterature, instead drawing extensively from research into a range of civilian organisations,from Indian textile factories and coal mines of the 1950s to the archetype of modern corporatedynamism, Wal Mart. The benefits are readily apparent, as the authors are able to establishparallels between civilian organisations and military command and control constructs.Identifying the commonalities—between the well-established field of civilian organisationaldesign research and the more recent inquiry into the networked military—facilitates the useof a broader range of theories.This expanding of the theoretical foundations of NCW is one of the key aims of the book. Inparticular, it seeks to extend ‘sociotechnical systems theory’ (SST), an organisational designtheory developed in the 1950s, into the NCW arena. Despite the different technologicalenvironments in which the two concepts developed, SST and NCW share a number of keysimilarities, most notably the focus on achieving joint optimisation of the social and technicalaspects of an organisation. What SST provides, which is somewhat lacking in the currentliterature on NCW, is a focus not only on the performance of the system but also the experienceof the human in shaping system effectiveness.A key strength of Command and Control: the sociotechnical perspective is the use of empiricalevidence. Rather than use an idealised model of how the human should act within a given95