Dialogues on Work and Innovation

The past is an increasingly unreliable guide to the future.

European workplaces and the regions in which they are located face unprecedented pressures and challenges. Whereas in recent decades incremental adaptation has largely been sufficient to cope with external change, it is no longer clear that this remains the case. Globalisation, technological development and dissemination, political volatility, patterns of consumption, and employee expectations are occurring at a rate which is hard to measure. The rate of change in these spheres is far outstripping the rate of organisational innovation in both European enterprises and public governance, leading to a serious mismatch between the challenges of the 21st Century and the organisational competence available to deal with them.

In this context, there is no clear roadmap. The contributors to this volume address these issues and demonstrate that building the knowledge base required by actors in this volatile environment requires continuous dialogue and learning – a context in which social partners, regional policy makers and other participants share diverse knowledge and reflect on experience rather than seeking and imitating any notion of ‘best practice’. Action Research has a crucial role to play, embedding shared learning within the process of innovation.

The Swedish Working Life Fund — a temporary organization functioning from 1990 to 1995 — distributed 10 billion Swedish crowns for workplace development and initiated 25,000 projects. About half of the total labor market was affected. This evaluation study, which is built on case studies as well as a survey of a representative sample of the project population, describes the emergent characteristics of organization development in Swedish enterprises and services. In order to locate the efforts of the Fund within an explanatory context, the study draws on the idea of concept-driven change, of participation in development processes, of development coalitions, of infrastructure for change and of a society, that is supportive of change.

While the need to utilise knowledge from social research in processes of development in working life is growing, there is also a growing recognition of the problems posed by this utilisation. As the belief in universal reason and general theory about topics like work organization and leadership has faded, research has to find a place as a local development actor. As such it is part of broad groups of actors, or development coalitions, as they are called in this book. Each coalition acquires unique characteristics and demands unique contributions from participating researchers. At the same time there is still a need for generalisable knowledge since all local processes are linked to global ones. Using an ongoing research-supported development program in Norwegian working life as the basis, this book explores the issues and problems associated with a new role for research as a mediator, not between general theory and local application, but between local workplace actors and global trends. The program in case encompasses a substantial number of enterprises — many of them organized in networks — and more than 50 researchers organized in seven groups, or modules.

Employment is clearly one of those fields of political activity that reveal the manifold problems and difficulties accompanying the process of European integration and supranational institutionalization. In particular the conflict between supranationalists and intergovernmentalists and the degree to which member states show willingness to cooperate with each other become manifest. The Union is struggling for new employment policies that should, on the one hand, be compatible with the European model of the welfare state, and, on the other, adopt to new economic constraints. These debates are accompanied by many conflicts between different interest groups and lobbies.

This study succeeded in looking behind closed doors within the EU organizational system. Committee meetings were tape-recorded and analysed, drafts of policy papers were examined for recontextualizations and the impact of interest groups and different economic and ideological concepts on policy-making made explicit. A comparison of decision-making processes in the European Parliament and in small networks of the Commission illustrates the different argumentation patterns and discursive practices that are involved in the formation of new employment policies. The ethnographic research is accompanied by a systemic linguistic and sociological analysis of various institutional genres and political spaces.

Researching Enterprise Development is written by the key researchers of a large Norwegian Action Research program on enterprise development (Enterprise Development 2000). This book tells the stories of how the seven participating modules were developed, created and sustained as Action Research activities. Based on these stories, reflection on a broader analysis of core issues of the program are given on the following topics:

• the processes within the program and changing models for leadership

• how research groups become proficient as action researchers

• local research as networking with the regional business community

• enhancing the innovation capacity of participating companies

• participation and democratic processes in enterprise development



The reflections and stories provide detailed accounts of how this Action Reseach program was developed and ample ideas on how Action Research modules can be implemented for other enterprise development projects.The book is preceded by Work Organisation and Europe as a Development Coalition (edited by Richard Ennals and Bjorn Gustavsen, 1999), and the results of the ED 2000 project are explained in Creating Connectedness (edited by Bjorn Gustavsen, Hakon Finne and Bo Oscarsson, 2001).

Searching explains how to make the fundamental cultural change required for a desirable sustainable future. It describes the ‘two-stage model’ of open-systems social science in action and covers two major methods: the Search Conference for strategic planning and community development; and the Participative Design Workshop for the genotypical design and redesign of organizational structures. The result of nearly 50 years of integrated conceptual and practical development, Searching shows that by replacing 200 years of mechanistic assumptions with concepts and principles which accurately capture human and social realities, these methods generate intrinsic motivation and release human potentials for change. Starting with the building blocks of this internally consistent theoretical framework, Part I explains the interrelations and shows how the power of the methods for achieving this cultural change is generated. Part II of the book describes the methods and illustrates their flexibility by discussing some of their most common variations.

Work Organization has achieved recent prominence in European policy, as new employment guidelines are embodied in the policies of all European Member States. New forms of Work Organization, properly understood, offer collaborative competitive advantage to European enterprises. This book, based on decades of action research in separate European nations, identifies the research background from which these new insights and policy initiatives have emerged, with continuing lessons to be learned from differences.

Work Organization is the missing link which enables innovation and training to produce sustainable increases in productivity: this is not mere academic theory but also vital practical business. The book launches a new European research agenda, which is attracting interest from across the developed world and beyond. Rather than arguing for a stronger role for the state, or simply leaving matters to the market, the book presents a “third way” based on networks and coalitions, illustrated with numerous current European case studies, which provide explanations for developments at the level of enterprises, regions and the European Union itself. The book provides valuable insights into new European Commission initiatives and Transatlantic Dialogue, and provides the foundations for renewed democratic dialogue.