Merrelyn Emery

Merrelyn Emery
Born
Merrelyn Burchett

(1940-04-27)27 April 1940
Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia
DiedAugust 2026(2026-08-00) (aged 86)
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
EducationUniversity of New England (BA, 1960; BA Hons, 1964), University of New South Wales (PhD, 1986)
Known forOpen systems theory, Search Conference, Participative Design Workshop
PartnerFred Emery (died 1997)
Scientific career
FieldsSocial science, organizational development
WorkplacesAustralian National University (1967–1997)
Concordia University (adjunct)
Websitewww.socialsciencethatactuallyworks.com

Merrelyn Emery (27 April 1940 – August 2026) was an Australian social scientist known for her contributions to Open systems theory (OST) as a framework for organisational and community change. Her work included the two-stage model of active adaptation combining the Search Conference with the Participative Design Workshop and the systematisation of the Search Conference method in her 1982 monograph Searching, substantially revised in Searching: The theory and practice of making cultural change (1999).

Early life and education

Merrelyn Emery was born on 27 April 1940 in Broken Hill, New South Wales, and grew up partly in Broken Hill and partly on an Aboriginal camp at Menindee on the Darling River. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at University of New England, with first-class honours, in 1964. In 1986, she was awarded a PhD in marketing by the University of New South Wales for research on the neurophysiological effects of television viewing.

Career

Emery worked as a part-time demonstrator and research assistant in psychology at the University of New England (1963–1965), and then at the Australian National University (ANU) from 1967. She joined the ANU's Centre for Continuing Education in 1970, as both a tutor and research assistant, and from 1976 to 1997 as a lecturer. It is here she and Fred Emery collaborated on the development of OST and its applied methodologies in Australia and internationally. She has held an adjunct position at the Department of Applied Human Sciences, Concordia University, in Montreal, and was an associate of the consultancy Amerin Pty Ltd.

In 2012, she delivered the W. Ross Ashby Memorial Lecture at the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna, sponsored by the International Federation for Systems Research.

Research

Emery's doctoral dissertation examined the impact of television viewing on children. Chris Mercogliano discusses her work in his 2004 book Teaching the Restless in which he notes Emery noted the absence of research in the area, leading her status as a 'leading expert in the field.: 174  Emery's work further showed that children are not equally susceptible to issues with exposure to television, and it was the act of watching television and not its content that was problematic.: 176 

Emery's later research and consulting work focused on Open Systems Theory: 678  as developed at the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s and 1960s and extended in Australia from 1969 onward. Her contributions span methodology, theoretical development and applied research.

Search Conference and Participative Design Workshop

Emery systematised the Search Conference,: 17  which is a participative planning method originated by Fred Emery and Eric Trist at the Tavistock Institute in 1959, as a reliable method for organisational and community change. In his 1992 book, Marvin Ross Weisbord described her as 'an explorer who has influenced a generation of search managers'.: 11  Her 1982 monograph Searching: for New Directions, in New Ways, for New Times documented the method's design and management alongside anthropological evidence for participative-democratic structures in pre-industrial cultures. The book was substantially revised as Searching: The theory and practice of making cultural change (1999), which became the standard reference on the method in English. With Ronald E. Purser she also co-authored The Search Conference (1996). She edited the 1993 volume Participative Design for Participative Democracy, the definitive treatment of the Participative Design Workshop, and established variants of the workshop suited to different organisational contexts.

Two-stage model of active adaptation

Emery formulated the two-stage model that combines the Search Conference (for participative strategic planning) and an adapted version of the Participative Design Workshop (structural design) into a single methodology for what OST calls active adaptation.: 246  De Guerre and Deering describe the theoretical framework as incomplete until she developed the model, with earlier applications often failing at the implementation stage.

Systemic statistics

With Rossana Alvarez, Emery published in Systemic Practice and Action Research in 2000 the first quantitative analysis of an organisation-in-environment derived from qualitative Search Conference data, establishing a method for producing quantitative results from qualitative material without discarding context.

Death

Emery died in Canberra in August 2026, at the age of 86.

Selected publications

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 de Guerre, D. W. & Deering, P. (2016). A Practical, Contextual Social Science to Engage the World - Merrelyn Emery and Open Systems Theory. www.socialsciencethatactuallyworks.com
  2. 1 2 Babüroğlu, Oğuz N. (1992). "Tracking the development of the Emery–Trist Systems Paradigm (ETSP)". Systems Practice. 5 (3): 263–290. doi:10.1007/BF01059830.
  3. ↑ Bawden, Richard. "Frederick Edmund (Fred) Emery". Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
  4. ↑ "W. Ross Ashby Memorial Lecture 2014". European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research.
  5. ↑ Emery, Merrelyn (1985). The social and neurophysiological effects of television and their implications for marketing practice : an investigation of adaptation to the cathode ray tube (PhD thesis). UNSW Sydney. doi:10.26190/unsworks/6175.
  6. 1 2 3 Chris Mercogliano (5 January 2004). Teaching the Restless. Internet Archive. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-3246-6.
  7. 1 2 Holman, Peggy; Devane, Tom; Cady, Steven (2007). The change handbook [electronic resource] : the definitive resource on today's best methods for engaging whole systems. Internet Archive. San Francisco : Berrett-Koehler. ISBN 978-1-57675-509-9.
  8. 1 2 Weisbord, Marvin Ross (1992). Discovering common ground : how future search conferences bring people together to achieve breakthrough innovation, empowerment, shared vision, and collaborative action. Internet Archive. San Francisco : Berrett-Koehler. ISBN 978-1-881052-08-1.
  9. ↑ Emery, Merrelyn (1999). Searching: The theory and practice of making cultural change. John Benjamins. ISBN 9789027217684.
  10. ↑ Alvarez, Rossana C.; Emery, Merrelyn (2000). "From Action Research to System in Environments: A Method". Systemic Practice and Action Research. 13 (5): 683–703. doi:10.1023/A:1009533727718.
  11. ↑ "Remembering Merrelyn Emery". The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. 20 August 2026. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
  12. ↑ Review of The Search Conference
  13. ↑ Review of Educational Futures