Why everyone does better when employees have a say in the workplace

In February, workers in a Tennessee Volkswagen plant voted against union representation, something that William Lazonick and Tony Huzzard say is unfortunate. They write that to compete on the world stage, a strong employee voice in the workplace matters. Using case-studies of automotive companies in Germany, Sweden and the U.S., they argue that compromises between the financial interests of shareholders and the productive interests of employees can lead to considerable success. High-performance workplaces, characterized by “high road” jobs in which productivity improvements and pay increases go hand in hand, are critical to sustained competitive advantage

Communities of Domination? Reconceptualising Organizational Learning and Power

In identifying a bias within situated learning theory towards routine work practices, this paper develops a theoretical framework for assessing the relationships between learning, sensemaking and power in the non-routine practices of temporary organising. The paper locates processes of sensemaking and learning in a model of organisational change that attempts to render power in communities of practice more visible than has been the case in theorising hitherto by focusing on sensegiving in change projects. Change is conceived in terms of an oscillation between the routines of permanent organising and the more experimental, innovative actions of temporary organising where leaders mobilise actors to explore new ideas. The role of sensegiving in such processes, it is argued, helps shed light on the political nature of micro-processes of change

Achieving impact : Exploring the challenge of stakeholder engagement

There is an increasing expectation from research funding bodies that projects in working life and policy research (and other fields) should demonstrate clear and demonstrable impacts on policy and practice. In turn, many also argue that impact, beyond scientific impact, can be leveraged by stakeholder engagement. But what do we mean by stakeholder engagement in the conduct of working life research? What are the challenges associated with stakeholder engagement in large, interdisciplinary projects? How are stakeholder engagement and impact linked in this domain? This paper addresses these questions by reflecting critically on a Horizon 2020 project QuInnE that had a dedicated work package that sought to investigate explicitly the forms of stakeholder engagement in working life research and how these might be linked to various forms of impact. Experiences from the project, however, suggest that these endeavours are easier said than done. The paper elaborates on various lessons for collaborative researchers not least that impact can be registered even when engagement is lower than expected and, moreover, that ad-hoc engagement can be a more realistic and productive ambition than engage-ment that is pre-planned and systematic

Discourse for Normalising What? The Learning Organization and the Workplace Trade Union Response

Recent critics of organizational learning and its normative offshoot the ‘learning organization’ have posited that conceptualisations of organizations based on knowledge and learning constitute a rhetorical device enabling elites to assert different forms of control through a new ‘normalising discourse’. The paper, whilst welcoming such critique, nevertheless asks whether it is adequate to dismiss the learning organization without proposing an alternative. Moreover, a case is made for serious evaluation of the extent to which learning might contribute to progressive development of the workplace. A comparison of two cases at manufacturing plants in northern Sweden suggests that whilst ‘the learning organization’ may indeed be criticised as a ‘normalising discourse’, in practice it does appear to be of some practical benefit to unions in the design of discursive arenas for humanisation of the labour process and promoting payments systems that reward competence development

The Convergence of QWL and Competitiveness: A Swedish Literature Review

This book investigates the relationship between the quality of working life (QWL) and competitiveness in the specific context of organisational innovations in Sweden. It proceeds by way of reviewing the literature of both a general theoretical nature on innovations, including Swedish research, and then looks more closely at the empirical evidence on the QWL-competitiveness relationship at the micro-level from the 1990s. The various studies referred to in the survey show that where innovations are motivated primarily by an improvement in QWL, such improvement can lead to improved performance. Despite the evidence that firms can reap considerable performance advantages through attempts at increasing the quality of working life through greater job enlargement, job enrichment, competence development and delegated participation, there is also considerable evidence that some firms are actually eschewing such approaches in deference to short-run pressure for immediate results on the ‘bottom-line’ of the profit and loss account and rapid increases in stock market valuation. Moreover, pressures for public expenditure cuts and new, market-based solutions are leading to major personnel cutbacks in the public sector. We can thus conclude that the price of competitiveness in Sweden has been an intensification in the pace and complexity of work. The challenge, therefore, is to design research activities with the aim of generating actionable knowledge for the development of sustainable work systems

Labouring to Learn : Union Renewal in Swedish Manufacturing

As a response to post-Fordist production conditions, Swedish manufacturing unions have sought to develop their respective agendas beyond the traditional focus on distribution issues. A new emphasis on competence at the workplace suggests an increasing need for unions to develop a capacity to learn as organisations. The thesis accordingly sets out to further our theoretical knowledge of change in the unions and encourage critical reflection amongst practitioners by means of a comparative study of learning in the two main Swedish manufacturing unions, Metall and SIF

Stakeholder Engagement Manual

This report been prepared as a deliverable for work package 2 of QuInnE – ‘Quality of Jobs and Innovation Generated Employment Outcomes’. This is an interdisciplinary research project investigating how job quality and innovation mutually impact on each other and the effects that this interaction has on job creation and the quality of new jobs. A key premise of the project is that for its findings to be effectively translated into practice, key stakeholders need to be engaged at all stages of the project. The purpose of the report is to evaluate the strategy of QuInnE in this regard, how this related to the impact generated by the project, reflect on the lessons learnt from the project experience and give guidance on these issues to other researchers and the Commission in the future. The report discusses briefly some of the scholarly discourse on how knowledge production might usefully be conceived, articulates the QuInnE strategy and the premises on which it is based and then proceeds to map out its realisation for the various activities of the project. The report also evaluates how and whether the stakeholder engagement it identifies has contributed to a number of impact measures. Finally, the report also proposes a number of tools for the mapping out of such stakeholder engagement and evaluating impact. These tools are proposed as being transferable to other projects in working life and policy research which similarly aim to promote stakeholder engagement and the identification and evaluation of consequent impact. A broad discussion of these issues is positioned in relation to the idea of engaged scholarship which, in similar vein, advocates a collaborative approach to the design, development and diffusion activities within a research project (Van de Ven, 2007).The main empirical content of the report is twofold. First a number of accounts and vignettes of stakeholder engagement are presented. This is done by focusing on input measures, that is, the efforts of each of the national teams charged with engaging stakeholders at various stages of the project. This material is presented on a country-by-country basis. Secondly, the findings of the project are presented in terms of measures of impact on policy, scientific production and workplace practice. These findings are presented as output measures on an impact-by-impact basis across the project by drawing on data supplied by the project’s work package leaders.At the time of writing this report it is still too soon to make definitive claims on many of the impact measures. But it is possible to make claims about potential impact on some of the measures and how these might be achieved. A useful concept for understanding this is that of pathways to impact, that is, a specification of the processes through which different types of impact might be realised, the productive interactions, the sub-processes, the delivery mechanisms and measurable impacts in each case. The report presents many examples of these which do lend support to the claim that concrete impacts are contingent on stakeholder engagement. On the other hand, although the project did indeed set out with the ideal of engaging with all relevant stakeholders throughout all the various stages and activities of the project, this was easier said than done. In this respect a number of difficulties materialised. Firstly, we discerned in some cases what might be called ‘psychic distance’, the fact that the methodology and work packages were pre-designed and led by teams in different countries meant that many stakeholders and stakeholder groups were more ‘arms length’ than would normally be the case (e.g. on a country-specific project), thus rendering stakeholder engagement somewhat redundant on some activities. A further issue was project length, the timescale for the project was longer than is normally the case for many research projects – and the varying speeds on the different work packages meant that coherent updates ‘across the project’ were difficult. Finally, there was an evident issue of high turnover amongst the personnel of some bodies from whom the project engaged stakeholders, notably government departments and business organisations, meaning that there were absences at meetings and securing new participants from the same department/organisation was a challenge, despite undoubted interest in various different parts of QuInnE. The overall picture of stakeholder engagement in the field of research highlights the importance of relevant access and a formulation of the research question that is in line with the questions stakeholders have concerning the economy and the labour market. However, in many cases it proved difficult to engage stakeholders in line with the project design. A number of lessons can be learnt from this:• Stakeholders are not necessarily interested in engaging in research projects before they produce results. Such engagement then depends largely on previous contacts of the research team with stakeholders and the level of trust they have built up. The process of tracking down appropriate stakeholders in some cases was convoluted and/or elusive. In some cases this can only be done after certain findings are generated.• The precise constellation of stakeholders will vary from setting to setting not least because of different institutional arrangements in eg industrial relations systems.• A further factor explaining the difficulties in stakeholder engagement was the extent to which collaborative research traditions have taken root. This varied noticeably across the project in terms of country and in terms of the academic disciplines from which the QuInnE national teams were composed.• A key factor that determines the success of a project and its potentiality for impact is the significance of timing. Sometimes it’s not enough to have an idea, however exciting and persuasive, if no-one is listening. In effect a number of things have to align for academics to conduct impactful research – they have to have ideas, and policymakers and practitioners have to have a need to listen. In this respect the initial bid for the QuInnE project was submitted at a moment in time when the European Commission was looking for ideas to improve innovation, for example, because the then existing ideas had failed to deliver. At the same time, trade unions and employers, in the UK for example, after years of neglect, were being urged to embrace the issue of job quality.• Finally, it is simply unrealistic to expect many concrete impact measures to be demonstrable within the normal timescale of a Horizon 2020 project (36 months). Genuine impact on many if not most measures, as usually defined in the literature, can only be assessed some time after the termination of a project. On the other hand, speculative claims about potential impacts can be made, and the routes to achieving these can be specified