Professor A Ken Rice worked in the Organizational Behavior Area from October 1968 to January 1969.
Prof. Rice attended Nottingham High School where he won an Exhibition Scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University but abandoned it halfway to study anthropology. Later, Prof. Rice joined the Colonial Service and served in Kenya for several years before returning to Britain to work as Assistant General Manager for Lewis's, Birmingham. He then functioned as Personnel Manager at G A Harvey & Co in London. Between 1945 and 1948, he was a Deputy Director of the Industrial Welfare Society in London, now referred to as, The Work Foundation. He married Marjorie Ansell in 1935 and had two daughters.
Prof. Ken Rice joined the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1948 and worked there until he passed away in 1969. Here, he developed his method of critically analyzing society and addressing problems faced by managers in industrial settings. Prof. Rice worked with Eric Miller on a number of projects. He directed Tavistock Institute's Group Relations Programme till 1969.
Prof. Rice was later employed by the Washington School of Psychiatry. He was also asked to reorganize the Yale University Medical School. Prof. Rice directed the first Group Relations Conference in the United States at Holyoke in 1965.
His Publications includes Productivity and Social Organization: The Ahmedabad Experiment. London (1958); The Enterprise and its Environment: A System Theory of Management Organization (1963); Learning for Leadership: Interpersonal and Intergroup Relations (1965) and Systems of Organization: Control of Task and Sentient Boundaries (1967).
The A K Rice Institute in the United States was set up by Margaret Rioch, Eric Miller and other colleagues in the memory of Prof. Rice.
Date of Birth: 1908
Date of Death: 15th November 1969