The issue of physical resources is one of considerable interest in the field of human resource management, but the solution to such difficulties must depend upon the skills and enterprise of those in positions of management. The purpose of this book, first published in 1975, is to focus upon these skills and upon the issues involved in examining the utilisation of human resources. The concept of human resources is an extremely broad one and there are many relevant disciplines. Each discipline provides information with respect to monitoring, developing or utilising the human resource. The set of papers in this volume will provide a source of reference for a wide range of research worker, practitioners and students in the total sphere of human resources as well as within the various disciplines represented.

The issue of physical resources is one of considerable interest in the field of human resource management, but the solution to such difficulties must depend upon the skills and enterprise of those in positions of management. The purpose of this book, first published in 1975, is to focus upon these skills and upon the issues involved in examining the utilisation of human resources. The concept of human resources is an extremely broad one and there are many relevant disciplines. Each discipline provides information with respect to monitoring, developing or utilising the human resource. The set of papers in this volume will provide a source of reference for a wide range of research worker, practitioners and students in the total sphere of human resources as well as within the various disciplines represented.

w. T. SINGLETON THE CONCEPT This is the fourth in a series of books devoted to the study of real skills. A skilled person is one who achieves his objectives effectively, that is by an optimal expenditure of effort, attention and other resources working within his native capacities of strength, vision, intelligence, sensitivity and so forth. It is difficult if not impossible to measure in a quantitative sense. There is, however, no question about its presence or absence. The differences between a highly skilled performer and a mediocre one are so readily manifest that there is no ambiguity. The student of skill is a person interested in what these differences are and how they originate. The importance and the difficulty of skill study is that the concept is a universal one for human activity. The movement of one limb can be skilled or unskilled within the context of a task, so also can the way a leader addresses a large meeting of his followers. For these and other equally disparate activities there are certain descriptive terms which always seem to be applicable: continuity, sequencing, timing, together with a subtle combination of sensi tivity, adaptability and imperturbability. What happens at any instant is set precisely with the flow from what has already happened to what is going to happen. The order of events has a determinate logic which may not be obvious to the observer except with the benefit of hindsight.

w. T. SINGLETON THE CONCEPT This is the third in a series of books devoted to the study of real skills. The topic is management. A book on social skills is still to come and it might seem that the sequence should be reversed on the grounds that social skills are obviously one element in management skills but it is appropriate to deal with management first on the criterion of increasing complexity. Management skills are easier to understand than general social skills. This is because the defining characteristic of a skill is a purpose. The purpose of organizations in which managers operate and the tasks in which they are engaged are not easy to define but they are certainly less obscure than are the more general purposes of communities and people interactions in which the complete range of social skills is practised. Skills, like purposes, are inherently to do with people. It follows that the 'skills view' of management will be as a people-based activity. Individuals carry out management tasks and these tasks always involve other individuals, of whom some are subordinate, some superior and some equivalent within the hierarchy of the particular management organization. The concept of a hierarchy is as central to management as it is to skills. The alternative to hier archy is anarchy. Management is not solely concerned with people.

W. T. SINGLETON THE CONCEPT This is the fourth in a series of books devoted to the study of real skills. A skilled person is one who achieves his objectives effectively, that is by an optimal expenditure of effort, attention and other resources working within his native capacities of strength, vision, intelligence, sensitivity and so forth. It is difficult if not impossible to measure in a quantitative sense. There is, however, no question about its presence or absence. The differences between a highly skilled performer and a mediocre one are so readily manifest that there is no ambiguity. The student of skill is a person interested in what these differences are and how they originate. The importance and the difficulty of skill study is that the concept is a univ~rsal one for human activity. The movement of one limb can be skilled or unskilled within the context of a task, so also can the way a leader addresses a large meeting of his followers. For these and other equally disparate activities there are certain descriptive terms which always seem to be applicable: continuity, sequencing, timing, together with a subtle combination of sensi tivity, adaptability and imperturbability. What happens at any instant is set precisely with the flow from what has already happened to what is going to happen. The order of events has a determinate logic which may not be obvious to the observer except with the benefit of hindsight.

This volume was originally published in 1982. Ergonomics is the study of people, primarily in relation to their work, but also with reference to transport, sport and leisure activities. The general purposes of this book were to apply to ergonomics the established principles of anatomy, physiology and psychology and to provide a comprehensive textbook and source of information in this area.

The origins of this book are in my first attempts to understand psychology as a post-war student in the Cambridge of the late 1940s. Sir Frederic Bartlett and his colleagues in the Psychology Department were talking and writing about the concept of the skill as the fundamental unit of behaviour. This made entire sense to me but not apparently to very many other people because the movement dwindled rapidly with the retirement of Sir Frederic in 1952. It got lost within performance studies which were essentially behaviouristic and stimulus-response in origin, a quite different style of thinking from the gestalt approach of skill psychology. This is not a simple dichotomy of course and skill psychology does go some way towards the analytic approach in accepting that a science needs to have a basic element, a unit from which the complexities of real behaviour can be constructed. into which it can be analysed and in terms of which it can be described and understood. The trick is to pick the right unit and I think that skills is an appropriate unit for human behaviour. Note the plural, although these units are elements they are not identical any more than the ninety-odd elements of the physical world are identical. The issue is sometimes clarified by considering the analogy with the attempt to describe a house. The simplest observable elements here are the brick. the piece of stone or the piece of wood.

This is the book of a conference held at Leuven, Belgium from June 5-9 1979 under the same title. The conference was sponsored by the Scientific Affairs Division of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Brussels. We would like to thank Dr. Bayraktar of NATO for his part in facilitating the organisation and support of the conference. We are also indebted to the authorities of the University of Leuven who provided excellent facilities and particularly to Professor Verhaegen of the Department of Psychology who acted as academic host to our conference. The aim of the conference was to bring together two groups of psychologists who have been developing in parallel their particular methods of studying and describing human behaviour. The skill psychologists began with the study of motor skills which are relatively easily observable in real jobs and recordable in the laboratory. More recently interests have shifted from motor skills through perceptual skills to the process skills where the operator is attending to many sources of information in the form of dials, charts and computer outputs and adjusting some process to maintain its stability and maximise the yield. Currently problems are arising of how to analyse situations in which several skilled individuals work closely together in small team performance. The social psychologists have followed an analogous but different path of progress.

Covering the psychological aspects of ergonomics, this volume places considerable emphasis on the radical changes in work practices over the past twenty years stimulated by high technology systems and computerization. Ergonomics is a multidisciplinary activity concerned mainly with people at work, but also with other human purposeful activities such as war, sports, games and leisure. The objective of ergonomics is to make these activities more effective and safer by applying established principles of anatomy, physiology and psychology. Together with Singleton's earlier volume, The Body at Work, this book forms a comprehensive textbook of ergonomics. This is a useful text for undergraduate and graduate students of psychology, physiology, management, social sciences, engineering, industrial design, computer science and information technology.

Covering the psychological aspects of ergonomics, this volume places considerable emphasis on the radical changes in work practices over the past twenty years stimulated by high technology systems and computerization. Ergonomics is a multidisciplinary activity concerned mainly with people at work, but also with other human purposeful activities such as war, sports, games and leisure. The objective of ergonomics is to make these activities more effective and safer by applying established principles of anatomy, physiology and psychology. Together with Singleton's earlier volume, The Body at Work, this book forms a comprehensive textbook of ergonomics. This is a useful text for undergraduate and graduate students of psychology, physiology, management, social sciences, engineering, industrial design, computer science and information technology.