Nowadays electrical force transducers, in which various electrical conversion principles are applied, are widely used. Transducers for forces from 1N till 10 MN are commercially available and used for industrial as well as research purposes. They not only serve to measure forces but also for weighing purposes. Directly converting a force into an electrical signal is not possible. This must be done step by step. For instance, in a strain gauge based transducer the conversion chain is: force - stress - strain - resistance change - bridge output. At every conversion point in this chain parasatic influences can interfere with the results and may cause a loss in accuracy. To surmount the problems related to obtaining sufficient accuracy and reliability for these transducers, much research has been done allover the world in the past 35 years. As a result, new materials, new techniques, improved constructional designs and compensation circuits have been found to overcome the parasitic influences. The object of the IMEKO Conferences on behalf of the Technical Committee on Measurement of Force and Mass (TC-3) is to exchange experiences, to discuss problems and to obtain knowledge about practical applications. In this book the papers have been collected that will be discussed at the 11th International Conference on Measurement of Force and Mass. The topic of this conference is "Mechanical Problems in Measuring Force and Mass".

This book is concerned with control issues in complex industrial organizations. The word control is used here in a rather wide sense, including decision making, coordination and planning as well as activities such as the design and implementation of organizational structures or computerized information systems. There are various ways of defining complexity; here we use this term to indicate that the organizations in question consist of many sub organizations which are operationally interdependent but at the same time have a fair degree of independence of control. The control of the interactions between these suborganizations through coordination will be a key issue in this book. The discussion will be confined to industrial organizations; our results are only applicable to a limited extent to other types of organizations such as universities, hospitals or government offices. The main contribution we intend to make in this book is the development of a system oj concepts on control and coordination in industrial organizations which can be used in the design of organizational control structures such as planning systems, information systems or relations between positions or departments. Rather eclectic use has been made of various scientific disCiplines in the development of this conceptual system with some bias towards the use of system theory and cybernetics. The book is intended for professional workers in the field of 'organizational control technology', such as automation and .organization specialists in complex organizations and workers in the related disCiplines at University.