Concepts and Transformation - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2001

In the years following the Second World War, the West German market economy was to distinguish itself as a social alternative, superior to the real socialism as it existed in East Germany with all its economic weaknesses and democratic deficits. Within the context of this social competition, the crisis of Fordist mass production led to increasing attempts to humanize the workplace. The result in 1974 was that the social/liberal coalition government instigated labor policies that the subsequent Christian Democrat/liberal government continued. As the policies were translated into reality, a reform constellation was to crystallize — a network which, in the 1980s, was able to develop innovative concepts for the labor process. Over the next decade, it promoted extended concepts for production, service and employment which, however, eventually stagnated against the background of increasingly neoliberal strategies of rationalization and deregulation. These resulted in problems for employment and employment policy, the solution of which demands wide-ranging labor policies.

New management methods are trying to reproduce the performance dynamics of self-employed entrepreneurs among their ‘regular’ employees, leading them to become the driving force of a company’s production growth. In order to do this, they have to replace the system of command and control by a system of indirect control, which makes the autonomous free will of the individual employee instrumental to the company’s purpose. Works councils and trade unions are thereby confronted with an entirely new situation, the main thrust of which is to render ineffectual the conventional means of conflict with which they are inclined to react to its negative consequences. To cope with this challenge agreement must be reached on our understanding of autonomy and the changes it encounters, associated with the changes in forms of management itself.

Over a period of several years, the employees and their superiors — together with their line manager,1 the author of this article — completely redesigned the labor process at and the structure of the Lemken Company, Rhineland, Germany. Decision making procedures and responsibility were transferred to work groups; middle management was reduced and decentralized; and the hierarchical organization was flattened out substantially. It was possible to create a shopfloor culture of trust based on direct communication between the work groups and the remaining management. Information, including that about the company’s financial situation, was made accessible to anyone in the company. Piecework payment was replaced by a fixed hourly wage. Flexitime and a voluntary profit sharing scheme were introduced.

When we look at the bulging group work literature, there aren’t many bigger riddles to solve than the question of why the discrepancy between propagation and realization of teams is, at the least, not getting any smaller. In this article I analyze the reasons for the sobering practice and the team-bias in the scientific optic. I describe two theoretical concepts and a method for the study of the dynamics, contradictions and limitations in team-based organizations. They are part of a resource-centered perspective, which is based upon four axioms: (1) In the study of complex social environments the main focus must shift from strategic action to the side effects of inter-action, and to their continuous evaluation. (2) There is no a priori unit for the study and design of work systems like the ‘team’; the focus should lie on the contextual embeddedness of cooperative units. (3) Autonomy has been a fetish of emancipatory work design approaches in a dual sense: an unquestioned goal, and a reified category. The new reality of decentralized work forces us to abandon the dualistic thinking dichotomies like autonomy-heteronomy. Autonomy is not a resource itself; it has to be understood as relation between job requirements and resources, task and context. (4) Challenging traditional ideas of autonomy, the concept of sustainability offers a new perspective for understanding and developing work. It focuses on the balance of consumptive and creative effects in the use of human, social and cultural resources.

The article presents the most recent workplace development program in Norway, called Value Creation 2010. With the notion of broad employee participation on enterprise level at its core, the program aims at creating and sustaining learning networks between enterprises and at strengthening regional and branch-based coalitions between private and public actors. The program is a joint creation of research, a public development fund and the labor market parties and reflects the idea of social partnership.