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To many a student of organizations, Lisl Klein may be known only as the person who joined Esso Petroleum in 1965 as an internal consultant and who was ushered out five years later when the Americans arrived, and who wrote a book about it. But she is so much more and she has contributed so much more! To say that Lisl Klein has been active and influential as a researcher and consultant in industry for nearly fifty years is an understatement. She has, in her own words in Working Across the Gap, had ‘a life-long love affair with industry’ and other kinds of organizations and she has had ‘a life-long fascination, not to say obsession, with the question of work satisfaction’ (p. 9). This collection of sixteen edited papers, most of them published earlier in the period from 1965 until 2001, which she now brings us, spans all her working years and gives a comprehensive picture of a remarkable career as a researcher and consultant as well as insights and criticisms of great value.
The main thread of the volume is the two-way traffic across the gap between the world of social science and the world of organizations. How do research, practice, and policy link up and interact? To begin, we are presented with a historical introduction, mainly from a British perspective, but also with Klein's personal background. Even if it is just personal in nature, it mirrors very well the general developments from after the Second World War to the end of the millennium. The young researcher's realization in the 1950s that social research always entails some form of influence and intervention and that this calls for especially high demands on the researcher's ethical awareness appears to be typical of the times. Here, we also find a belief in prediction typical of the period that we may miss in today's postmodern constructivist world of non-linear systems and complexity theory. Klein's first case study during these years sets two frames of reference for her later work: empirical findings in rese