Concepts and Transformation - Volume 4, Issue 1, 1999

The article presents a new European collaborative project, building on experience of regional development coalitions across Europe. Globalization is complemented by regionalization, and the emergence of new structures between the levels of individual enterprises and national governments. Competitive collaborative advantage is to be derived from learning across cultures, celebrating differences rather than seeking uniformity. Particular case study accounts are given from Italy, Germany and Sweden, but the framework is offered for a broader project, with the theme of Europe as a Development Coalition.

Regeneration, whether of companies, sectors or regions, must increasingly be led by knowledge and innovation. The critical need is to reconstitute the public sphere as a forum for collective action. New organizational structures are central to this project and intelligent models of organization are hesitantly emerging — at the level of the workplace, the industrial sector and the region. Regions are particularly significant for their ability to act as focal points for the convergence of economic opportunities, technologies, human resources and culture, becoming centers of collective learning. Regional competitiveness depends on the ability to unlock such resources through the creation of new partnerships and dialogue.

New approaches to securing jobs and dealing with structural transformation are being taken in Southeast Lower Saxony. The two companies that predominate in the region — Volkswagen AG and Salzgitter AG — have founded their own personnel development and training companies. A regional development agency has been set up with the participation of the trade unions. These new approaches can be understood both as internal company objectives and as a contribution to overall responsibility for a given location. Some exemplary project initiatives are presented here in the form of regional strategies for innovation and development concepts, business start-up networks and collaboration between business and universities.

The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna has often been presented as a case study of economic success through the development of structures to support collaboration between numerous small and medium sized enterprises. This article seeks to identify the distinguishing characteristics of the associations, districts and agencies involved, and describes phases of development over a number of decades. The Emilia-Romagna phenomenon is described in terms of local, regional and national government, and of the enduring enterprise culture of small businesses.

The concept of democratic participation has been receiving wide attention over the past few years — both in Germany and at the European level. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for social and corporate praxis where practical implementation of the idea encounters ingrained resistance and reservations from different groups. On the one hand, the trades unions are afraid that forms of direct democratic involvement will act in competition to the institutionalized forms of in-company codetermination; on the other, many managers — having discovered that worker involvement is a good way to improve both productivity and quality — are simultaneously opposed to the transfer to the grass roots of any real responsibility or decision making rights. Nevertheless, the narrow use of employee participation as a mere management strategy should not obscure our view of the opportunities for self-organization, democratization and personal development that are inherent to democratic participation.

In the current transformation of transnational corporations we are confronted with a new kind of dynamism inside these companies. To grasp the nature of these "self-organizing processes" becomes a prerequisite for employees to determine and assert their interests under the new conditions. The following article combines two spheres of work of the author. On the one hand there is the practical experience as employee and member of works council and supervisory board at IBM Informations-systeme GmbH in Germany. On the other hand there is a close cooperation with the philosophers Klaus Peters and Stephan Siemens.

Formerly the classic center of gravity for the world of work, the workplace as such is now losing its formative influence. It was on the workplace that instruments of social standardization were previously fixed. Work is becoming more flexible in time and more mobile in space; work forms are becoming more multilayered; CVs are looking increasingly more discontinuous. As new time-space relations emerge, new principles of action for dealing with social standardization are necessary. A joint trade union venture known as the multimedia + workworld bureau has already launched a number of experiments:work operations organized in keeping with the principles of management by objectives;an advisory service for questions relating to telework;the operation of a virtual network of experts;the development of benchmarks for matters of in-company data protection;ideas for supplementing the traditional instruments of social standardization.