Only a Ten Hour Week 
is the book written by our colleague Eli Berniker, who shared with us a summary of it during our meeting in San Francisco.
As many of you may know, Eli is professor emeritus with Pacific Lutheran University, where he taught operations management and systems. His research has been in the field of organization design with a particular focus on the challenges of operating highly complex technical systems.
Eli has designed production systems in the US, and factories and service operations for kibbutzim in Israel. He taught Sociotechnical Systems Design at graduate programs in the US and Europe. Eli has consulted with large and small enterprises in the US, Canada, and Israel. He and his wife Frances reside in Puyallup, Washington.
To buy this book, please, go to this link: https://www.createspace.com/6538714
This is a message from Eli:
Colleagues,
Only a Ten Hour Week: Architecture for a Sustainable Society of Plenty
The book is published after these many years of effort and expense. It is a call for organizational designers to expand their concerns and practice to include sustaining the human habitat. We are necessary contributors to the pursuit of world-wide sustainability.
My book is optimistic and practical. I hope it provides a useful toolkit for a sustainable future. I am serious about the ten-hour week and provide data and analyses to support that estimate.
Emery and Trist called for a Social Ecology recognizing that eventually organization design must evolve to designing the societal environment of human work organizations. The impetus for recent progress has been the challenges posed by the sustainability.
The nexus between STS and worldwide sustainability is the job. Everywhere, nations are seeking to increase employment in jobs exactly when sustainability calls for reducing our ecological footprint.
The essence of the job is to be expendable. Emery noted that jobs are defined so that each individual can be held accountable for their performance, i.e. be replaced. Worker priorities must be to keep their jobs, not a sustainable habitat.
Thus, transcending the job, as the core mode of work engagement, is a necessary component of any path towards world-wide sustainability. Those Durham coal miners who asked for a “common pay chit” became, in effect, a team based cooperative. They transcended “jobs” and were remarkably productive. The book develops models for all productive organizations, however owned, to transcend jobs and sustain their members.
What is new? Productive capitalism has created a world of plenty in an era when financial capitalism requires scarcity. Plenty is sustainable; scarcity is unsustainable. Maintaining scarcity requires enormous waste and vast overhead in all of our organizations.
When we meet all of humanity’s needs in ten hours of work a week, our ecological footprint will shrink dramatically.
Sustainable productive organizations need sustainable communities. The book draws upon Theoretical Ecology to both explain the failure of our communities and propose models for viable families, food security, and sustainable communities.
Models, not designs. We all know design requires a focus on the uniqueness of each organization, community and their environments.
The book is an exercise in Social Ecology developing architectural models for sustainable productive organizations and sustainable communities.
Social Ecology is necessarily an eclectic discipline that must integrate the organizational sciences, systems theory, economics, and ecological principles. This expands the horizon of practical organizational and community design possibilities. I present a coherent integration that represents a horizon with many more adjacent possibilities. I call it a practical utopia.
For more information, I invite you to explore the Contents and Glossary and availability on the web site:
Please order it at the CreateSpace website. The Kindle version is in process.
Cost: US $ 24.95 Can$33.00
Create Space: https://www.createspace.com/6538714
It is also available at Amazon website: North America, Europe, England, but I’d like to ask you to please order it through CreateSpace website.
