Peter Cressey

European perspectives on the learning organisation

This paper, based on a publication entitled Facing up to the Learning Organisation Challenge, published in April 2003, provides an overview of the main questions emerging from recent European research projects related to the topic of the learning organisation. The rationale for focusing on this topic is the belief that the European Union goals related to “lifelong learning” and the creation of a “knowledge‐based society” can only be attained if the organisations in which people work are also organisations in which they learn. Work organisations must become, at the same time, learning organisations. This paper has four main messages. The first is that, in order to build learning organisations, one has to ensure that: there is coherence between the “tangible” (formal/objective) and the “intangible” (informal/subjective) dimensions of an organisation; and that the organisations learning goals are reconciled with individuals’ learning needs. The complexity involved in ensuring the right balance between these different dimensions, means that in the final analysis one cannot realistically expect more than incomplete or imperfect learning organisations. However, this does not in any way negate the validity of the quest to reconcile these competing but “real” interests. The second message is that challenging or developmental work is a prerequisite for implementing a learning organisation. One of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it promotes human development. The third message is that the provision of support and guidance is essential to ensure that developmental work does in fact provide opportunities for developmental learning. The fourth message is that to address organisational learning there is a need for boundary‐crossing and interdisciplinary partnerships between the vocational education and training and human resource development communities.

Changing employment practices in UK banking: case studies

Presents and discusses findings from a major study of changing employment practices in UK banking. Uses case studies to explore different patterns of reaction to a fast and radically changing business environment. Addresses important questions including the nature of the changes to human resource management practices, the extent and depth of these changes and, most importantly, the degree to which the different banks are following similar or divergent paths. Offers explanations for the findings under each of these headings.

Whatever Happened to Social Dialogue? From Partnership to Managerialism in the EU Employment Agenda

There has been a major bifurcation in the level and form of social dialogue between employers and unions within the EU. The intersectoral and sectoral social dialogue launched by the Val Duchesse process in 1985 now runs in parallel with domestic forms that are merely reacting to agendas established by the Commission and the Council. This article, based on interviews with employer, union and government representatives across six EU member states, argues that the European Employment Strategy is converting social dialogue into a managerialist process by decentralizing it to national level and co-opting the social partners into taking responsibility for meeting employment targets over which they have had no influence.

Industry change and union mergers in British retail finance

This paper investigates the reasons for and implications of the recent merger between three of the largest unions in the retail finance sector, creating UNIFI. Recent union mergers have been explained by environmental changes adversely affecting membership and finances. These prompt leaders to consider merger as an appropriate organizational solution. Mergers are successfully concluded when leaders are able to overcome internal resistance and develop acceptable outcomes. We examine whether these factors are sufficient to explain how the merger between the national banking union and two large company-based staff unions was concluded, given longstanding institutional rivalry.

Understanding staff perspectives of quality in practice in healthcare.

BackgroundExtensive work has been focussed on developing and analysing different performance and quality measures in health services. However less has been published on how practitioners understand and assess performance and the quality of care in routine practice. This paper explores how health service staff understand and assess their own performance and quality of their day to day work. Asking staff how they knew they were doing a good job, it explored the values, motivations and behaviours of staff in relation to healthcare performance. The paper illustrates how staff perceptions of quality and performance are often based on different logics to the dominant notions of performance and quality embedded in current policy.MethodsUsing grounded theory and qualitative, in-depth interviews this research studied how primary care staff understood and assessed their own performance and quality in everyday practice. 21 people were interviewed, comprising of health visitors, occupational therapists, managers, human resources staff and administrators. Analytic themes were developed using open and axial coding.ResultsDiverse aspects of quality and performance in healthcare are rooted in differing organisational logics. Staff values and personal and professional standards are an essential element in understanding how quality is co-produced in everyday service interactions. Tensions can exist between patient centred, relational care and the pressures of efficiency and rationalisation.ConclusionsUnderstanding the perspectives of staff in relation to how quality in practice develops helps us to reflect on different mechanisms to manage quality. Quality in everyday practice relies upon staff values, motivations and behaviours and how staff interact with patients, putting both explicit and tacit knowledge into specific action. However organisational systems that manage quality often operate on the basis of rational measurement. These do not always incorporate the intangible, relational and tacit dimensions of care. Management models need to account for these relational and experiential aspects of care quality to support the prioritisation of patients’ needs. Services management, knowledge management and ethics of care literature can provide stronger theoretical building blocks to understand how to manage quality in practice.

Employment, Employment, Employment: Is Europe Working?

No abstract available.

Social Innovation at Work: Workplace Innovation as a Social Process

What happens in the workplace has enormous social as well as economic implications. Workplace innovation is the process through which “win-win” approaches to work organisation are formulated – good for the sustainable competitiveness of the enterprise and good for the well-being of employees. Workplace innovation is also an inherently social process involving knowledge sharing and dialogue between stakeholders.

Social Europe: National Initiatives and Responses

I 1997 Employment Guidelines adopted at the Luxembourg summit (under the four ‘pillars’ of employability, entrepreneurialism, adaptability and equal opportunities) (European Commission, 1997b); I 1997 Green Paper, Partnership for a New Organisation of Work (European Commission, 1997a); I 1998 Social Action Programme (European Commission, 1998a); and I 1998 Communication, Modernising the Organisation of Work (European Commission, 1998c)

The social impact of advice during disability welfare reform: from social return on investment to evidencing public value through realism and complexity

ABSTRACT This article illustrates how advice services create diverse public values within welfare reform. It develops a social impact framework using public value, realism, and complexity literature. Starting from a social return on investment study of advice, qualitative interviews are analysed with twenty-two clients, who sought advice for welfare benefits, and had disabilities, or physical or mental health conditions. Integrating these clients’ experiences with wider evidence illustrates how advice services advocated for people’s needs within a complicated (and controversial) welfare system. However, advice services face funding cuts, benefit assessment costs have risen, and welfare reforms have yet to meet their aims.

Book Review: Social Partnership and Economic Performance

political system and marketization of the economy, now the time has come to reform the social sectors. The reviewed book is devoted to the challenges and dilemmas of that second stage of transformation. In the first stage, radical changes of political and economic systems had a more or less revolutionary character. Currently, post-socialist countries are moving from extraordinary to normal politics in which all determinants of the policy-making process are coming to the forefront. Hence, the course of social-sector reforms will not be shaped by extraordinary circumstances and ideological considerations but by routine decision-making processes, characteristic for a democratic, multiparty parliamentary system. The authors of the reviewed book thoughtfully and critically characterized most major aspects of these processes, and this constitutes – in my opinion – one of the greatest merits of their work. Reforming the State is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research group organized in the late 1990s by Collegium Budapest, the first institute for advanced studies in Eastern Europe. The researchers, representing several post-socialist countries (Hungary, Poland, Russia, Romania) and some ‘outsiders’ (of American, German, Italian and Swedish origin) focus their work on the interaction between political and economic reforms. The volume comprises eight chapters, grouped into two parts. The first part concentrates on the making of fiscal policy in Hungary, Georgia and Russia. The second part is focused on health care and pension reforms in Hungary and Poland. The editors have also included an interesting chapter on the relevance of Swedish experience to former socialist countries. This is not a book for those looking for detailed information about the content of particular social programmes. It is primarily a volume for those interested in the politics of fiscal and social reforms, i.e. how various political institutions and decision-making processes influence policy outcomes. The editors are fully aware that their work cannot be considered a comprehensive examination covering all the important questions, but it constitutes rather a set of initial observations and conjectures, although all strongly supported by evidence. In the year 2001, almost three years after the end of the research work, it is evident that policy outcomes are influenced not only by various elements of decision-making processes, but also by the implementation of reforms. It is not enough to elaborate a consensus around a particular reform and have it accepted by policymakers, since the lack of ‘implementation’ potential could contribute to the failure of even a very cleverly designed and skilfully passed reform project, as may happen to the reform of the pension system in Poland. Finally, one more personal reflection. I must admit that since finishing this book I have felt a little uneasy. I have reasons both to be satisfied and sad. Satisfied, because after many years of marginalization of social policy, both in socialist and post-socialist years, in the second stage of transformation social-sector reforms are coming to the forefront. Sad, because in the light of the essays presented in the reviewed book, the stress is much more on the ‘policy’ than on the ‘social’ side of reforms.