Eric Miller: A Biographical Sketch

After a long illness, Eric Miller passed away in London on 5th April 2002. He was one of the most influential practitioners and theoreticians of work and organizational life during the second part of the 20th century.

Eric Miller was born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire on 24th February 1924, just after World War I. When very young he saw active service in World War II. Miller was a man of his time, coming of age in a period of great social upheavals and events - both positive and negative - economic boom, growth and development, as well as dislocations, contradictions, ambivalence and the transformations of traditional identity. It was a time of extraordinary ideals and attainments, but also of spectacular and wrenching despair. His generation was that of Eric Trist and Tommy Wilson, and overlapped that of Ken Rice and Harold Bridger; who in their young adult years lived through an especially intense time in history, that doubtless shaped, to a great extent, their work and social commitments.

After attending the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, in 1941 he was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at Jesus College Cambridge. But unfortunately the war began and, after attending a year at University, he had to join the army and became a junior officer in the Royal Artillery in Britain, India and Burma. In South-East Asia he was exposed to the cultural complexity of those lands, for example in Burma being part of an Hindu and Muslim artillery unit, close to other units made up of Sikhs and Gurkhas. This particular experience, at such an early stage of his life, was especially influential in defining his subsequent development, identity and interests. After the war he went back to Cambridge, changed from Classics to Anthropology and took his First degree. Immediately afterwards, he returned to India for two years for his doctoral work, with funding for field research together with his first wife and fellow anthropologist, the late Kathleen Gough. It was during the