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.

The analysis of practical skills (Croom Helm Biology in Medicine Series)

Politics & Social Sciences

W.T. Singleton

Social Sciences

MTP Press Limited

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.

Social Skills

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

MacMillan Technical Publishing

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.

Management Skills

Springer London

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