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223 Afterword by Geert Van Hootegem If even popular television cooking programs end with the apparently obligatory lessons learned, then we, as scientists, better not lag behind. Maybe we should even take the lead. What have I learned from this book and from the project that preceded it? And especially, what am I supposed to do with it? In the first place, the study confirmed that the establishment of links between two independently operating scientific communities can yield surprising and fresh insights. The problem statements, research questions and related discussions from within the scientific GIS and SDI community changed the way I look at my own concepts and theoretical insights. Sometimes you need to travel to a foreign region in order to reach a better understanding of your own region. That describes exactly the feeling I have today. Travelling the SDI landscape proved to be a surprising and exciting trip. A journey that takes a special place among the many excursions I have made so far. I still remember it as if it was yesterday. A contact, out of the blue. I had never heard of GIS, let alone of SDI. Ezra Dessers came to me with the message that, despite the many financial and intellectual efforts, GIS and SDI apparently were not quite able to meet the expectations in daily practice. He wanted to start a PhD study on the subject, assuming that the key to success might lay in piloting the organisation, and more specifically the workplace organisation in the SDI network. The book that you just read presents the ultimate result of a co-creation between two separate scientific and policy worlds. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. An incredibly fascinating world has emerged for me. A world in which colleagues whose work I previously did not know about, are contributing to a better world. Judging from the many comments on the project and on this book, I noticed that not only a lot has been learned, but that also many insights and ideas are already being applied and tried out, leading to new successes and failures, and further on to new lessons learned. But for myself, the lessons learned are situated primarily in my own scientific area, which is the world of organisations: how they relate to each other, and how their internal functioning can be understood. It is about the game, the field, and the players in the interand intra-organisational division of labour. Dessers has made an important contribution to unlocking the insights of the so-called Modern Sociotechnical Systems approach. In the humanities, we unfortunately do not yet have many robust predictive theories, because our research disciplines are relatively young, and our research objects often are complex. However, the Modern Sociotechnical Systems theory does have this ambition and potential. This theory about production processes predicts impacts on the quality of the organisation and on the quality of work, based on the causal combinations of specific environmental and organisational characteristics. The theory has (or had) two defects. It originated in the Low Countries just before the internationalisation and the Anglicisation struck. This resulted in an entire library, filled with books, dissertations and scientific articles in a language only spoken by 28 million people. With this publication, Dessers helps to internationally unlock this promising theory of intra- and interorganisational division of labour. In that sense, this book can be situated in a portfolio of activities such as the European Learning Network for Workplace 224 Innovation (EUWIN), and the recently initiated collaboration between European and North American Sociotechnical Systems researchers and practitioners in the STS Round Table. Even more important is that his research has earned his place in a series of studies and dissertations which empirically validate diverse aspects of the Modern Sociotechnical Systems theory. The theory consists of a comprehensive set of logical propositions which is appealing to many organisational researchers, consultants, managers and unionists for its theoretical plausibility. Yet there is rightly much demand for a thorough empirical validation. This book contributes in a very convincing way to answering this demand. The lesson that sticks in my memory is the creative application of the theory in function of present scientific questions, but also in terms of current policy issues. The Modern Sociotechnical Systems theory is essentially a theory of production processes. Production processes can be found in all types of social systems. We could analyse production processes in a family context. The production processes of a neighborhood barbecue, or...

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