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 Paper presented at the 6^th European IIRA Congress,
Oslo, 25-29 June, 2001

Tuomo Alasoini
Ministry of Labour, P.O. Box 34, 00023 Government, Finland
tuomo.alasoini@mol.fi

A CONCEPT-DRIVEN MODEL FOR WORKPLACE CHANGE – EVIDENCE FROM 54 FINNISH CASE STUDIES

This paper examines strategies of workplace change from the point of view of industrial relations and work organization development. The author utilizes an argument put forward by Gustavsen et al. (1996), according to which front-line Swedish enterprises, such as ABB, managed in the 1990s to speed up processes of change by adopting a model driven by concepts. This framework is used to analyse change in 54 Finnish enterprises and public bodies. The sample comprises development projects implemented between 1996-2000 and funded by the Finnish Workplace Development Programme.

Models for change — the role of top management, middle management and employees in change

There are many different ways of carrying out operative and organizational changes in the workplace. Models for change can be classified from a number of different viewpoints (Salminen 2000). The role of the different groups in the workplace (top management, middle management and employees) in the change process is one of the relevant classification criteria, particularly from the point of view of industrial relations and workplace development. On this basis, at least the following types of models can be distinguished:

In a Taylorist or bureaucratic model, change is brought about by detailed instructions from the management down through the hierarchical levels (figure 1). Top management decides on the change, defines its aims and delegates implementation to middle management. Employees are not expected to be involved in planning and their influence is limited largely to their ability to use the official negotiations system to achieve their goals for traditional distributive issues such as employment security, wages and working times. Examples of this kind of model for change include a traditional rationalization project aimed at cutting production costs or a project to change the corporate culture, which ‘trickles’ through the organization from the top down in the form of campaigns.

Figure 1. Taylorist-bureaucratic model for change.

Top management can also strive to make changes without active involvement by middle management or employees by using outside consultants, for instance information technology experts (figure 2). The aim in such a case could be a major operative or organizational transformation, for instance a change in the company’s main business processes. This type of model could be called a programmatic model. The top management has a specific programme which it sets out to implement within the organization without compromises and through detailed control. Interest in the programmatic model has increased in recent years, particularly as a consequence of rapid advances in information technology and the change programme concepts developed by major management consultants. Such concepts in the 1990s included ‘business process reengineering’ (BPR), ‘outsourcing’, ‘downsizing’ and ‘delayering’.

Figure 2. Programmatic model for change.

Top management may also work directly with the employees, thus striving to bypass middle management or at least neutralize its role as an active contributor to change (figure 3). This type of participatory model for change would be typical in a situation where top management wants to make the organization flatter and leaner by delegating decision-making and responsibility to the shop floor, and where it anticipates resistance to change from middle management because the latter feels its position is threatened. Top management ‘buys’ the approval of the employees by offering them a chance to take part in planning and implementing the change and by promising improvements in terms and conditions of employment. Examples of this type of model can be found both in socio-technical experimentation in work redesign in the 1960s and 1970s and in recent company projects to introduce self-managing team-based work organization.

Figure 3. Participatory model for change.

The Japanese quality improvement model is a separate change model, distinct from the previous models. In this model, production organization and development organization are seen as two different layers, each of which function according to a different logic (figure 4). Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) call this kind of multi-layered organization a hypertext organization. A well-known example of a hypertext organization is the unit made up of a production organization and a parallel quality circle organization. The fact that quality circles developed in Japan into parallel organizational models for production organizations in bringing about change derives from the country’s distinctive historical and cultural conditions, within which it was important for companies to be able to draw on employees’ active input in development activities without disrupting their hierarchical authority structures (Lillrank 1995, 980-982).

Figure 4. Japanese quality improvement model.

Each of these four change models has its strengths and its weaknesses and they are suited in different ways to different situations and social contexts. From the point of view of industrial relations, bypassing middle management or employees, thus preventing them from taking an active part in the process of change, can lead to one-sided targets for change or to short-sighted target setting, and also to a lack of commitment on the part of groups that were bypassed or even to outright resistance to change. This may mean that important potential productivity reserves are left untapped in the change process.

The concept-driven model for change

Gustavsen et al. (1996) went through 93 development projects for companies and public bodies in their evaluation report on the Swedish Working Life Fund Programme (1990-1995). According to their assessment, the front-line workplaces in Sweden strove during the 1990s to improve their capacity for rapidly implementing extensive operative and organizational changes. The best-known example of this was ABB’s T 50 programme, in which the company’s Swedish units aimed to halve total cycle times within about three years — and mostly succeeded. The researchers identified 14 distinctive features that they used to characterize the new type of concept-driven change model characteristic of these workplaces (table 1).

Table 1. Features of the concept-driven change model (source: Gustavsen et al. 1996, 54-58).

This description of the concept-driven model differs from all the models described above with respect to the roles of the different groups in the workplace (figure 5).

Figure 5. Concept-driven model for change.

The concept-driven model emphasizes the importance of mobilizing the entire personnel, and hence the variety of targets and criteria for development work, much more than the Taylorist-bureaucratic model and the programmatic model. Although radical changes in line with BPR ideology can be implemented in a number of ways, extensive personnel participation in process re-engineering is not considered essential for the successful implementation of change in the most influential literature in the field (Davenport 1993; Hammer & Champy 1993). In the concept-driven model, furthermore, mobilization is not primarily used as a means of legitimizing change by ensuring personnel commitment to it; rather, it is a way of making the best possible use of employees’ views and experiences in planning and implementing change. The variety of targets and criteria for development work reflects the fact that productivity and the quality of working life are not seen as isolated targets, or even conflicting aims, in the implementation of change but are perceived as asserting a positive interaction. In BPR literature, the targets of development work are linked uniformly to a rapid improvement in business performance. If improvements in the quality of working life — for instance, more challenging and varied work for employees — are dealt with at all, they are presented uncritically and as something of a self-evident by-product of the change process.

In the participatory model, the focus for change is typically the decision-making and power structures of the company. This type of model can be more receptive to innovative development, especially in companies with advanced information technology, than the traditional Taylorist-bureaucratic or programmatic models, as Naschold (1994, 40-43) suggests. One potential danger of both the participatory and the programmatic model is, however, excessive dismantling of the structures supporting development work, if broader self-management for each team weakens the potential for coordinating development work, or the line organization is harnessed only to achieving the immediate production targets. A tendency to disregard the tacit knowledge of middle management and the risk of their forceful resistance to change are other potential problems of these models. In the concept-driven model, meanwhile, the entire organization and all its functions are subject to development simultaneously. The broad mobilization of the workforce applies to all groups, and, in this model, the existence of adequate supporting structures for development work is considered one of the first requirements for successful change.

The concept-driven model has many features in common with the Japanese quality improvement model. These include the importance of policy which is carefully ‘trickled’ from the top down as the initiating force of development efforts, the emphasis on the importance of the development organization, broad mobilization of the entire workforce, and the concept of the critical mass required in support of the development work. The latter, especially, is an area where workplaces in western industrial countries have lagged behind their Japanese counterparts. Central government and labour market organizations with their development programmes and campaigns have not been able to create the same kind of national workplace development infrastructure in western industrial countries as the quality movement did in Japan (Cole 1989; Gustavsen 1993).

There are also differences of principle between the models. The concept-driven model is a conceptual construction created by researchers, based on empirical data, and it shows a possible world-class development model for a company or public body in the Nordic labour market environment. The model is tied to its social context, as is the Japanese quality improvement model. The most striking differences can be summarized as follows:

1. The policy which controls development work is not necessarily founded on quality where the concept-driven model is concerned; the umbrella concept of development work may be something else, for instance total cycle times, as in ABB’s case. The total cycle time of the T 50 programme could be seen largely as a frame of reference for joint development effort in the way that quality is a frame of reference in the Japanese quality movement, even if it does not have the same background of theoretical, even philosophical, discussion. Total cycle time is a strategic aim which is easy to quantify; achievement of this aim is likely to have a strong correlation with cost savings and the aim itself can be easily understood by all employees.

2. The conceptual differentiation between development organization and production organization is a feature of both the Japanese quality improvement model and the concept-driven model, but one of the latter’s aims is to merge the two organizations. In an ideal situation, "the development organization gradually becomes the regular company organization" (Gustavsen et al. 1996, 62). In recent years, it has been typical of Nordic workplaces that planning and development responsibility are delegated downward within the production organization to teams, rather than that organizations such as quality circles are set up outside the production organization for the development work.

3. The concept-driven model places much more emphasis than the Japanese quality improvement model on the importance of intensive pace of change. The roots and origin of the quality improvement model lie in mass production, whereas the concept-driven model starts with the need to cope in a rapidly changing, dynamic environment requiring great flexibility.

The aim of this article

According to Gustavsen et al., the companies and public bodies which apply the concept-driven model represent ‘the forefront of development’ in Sweden. They felt, based on 93 case studies in the Working Life Fund Programme, that 28 of these, or about one in three, could be classified as examples of concept-driven change (Gustavsen et al. 1996, 62-63). This classification was based mainly on the characteristics of the development organization, but no precise criteria were given in the report.

The labour market environment in Finland is similar to that in Sweden, so it should be possible to assume that the concept-driven model is also an appropriate approach to studying the ‘forefront of development’ in Finland. Although the development of work organization has received more nationwide attention in Sweden than in Finland, and although Sweden has profiled itself more strongly than Finland as a pioneer in this field, both countries were essentially subject to the same pressures for development during the 1990s.

Decentralization of the collective bargaining system may be assumed to be an important factor in promoting collaborative implementation of operative and organizational change in Finnish workplaces in recent years. Although the Finnish bargaining system is still fairly centralized by international standards, it has become possible from the 1993 round of bargaining onward to talk of ‘centralized decentralization’, the main characteristic being that local (company) bargaining becomes more important within an institutional framework regulated by sectoral collective agreements (Lilja 1998). On the workplace level, there is a strong positive link between the scale of local bargaining and the scale of changes in job descriptions and the organization of work. Centralized decentralization is also an apt characterization of the change in the bargaining system in the sense that more local agreements have been made at those Finnish workplaces where the bargaining position of the workforce is stronger (Uhmavaara et al. [eds.] 2000).

In the following, the concept-driven model is applied to analysis of the change processes in the companies and public bodies included in the Finnish National Workplace Development Programme (FINWDP), in 1996-1999. The aims, extent and duration of the change processes are comparable to those of the projects in the Swedish Working Life Fund Programme. This article is an analysis of the extent to which features of the concept-driven model can be found in the change processes at Finnish workplaces, the type of umbrella concepts that workplaces have chosen for their change policies, and whether workplaces have succeeded in speeding up the pace of change by applying the concept-driven model. These questions are linked with more general issues involving workplace capacity for implementing change with increased efficiency and the relationship between development organizations and the traditional workplace-level negotiating and employee participation systems.

The aim of the FINWDP is to "improve productivity and the quality of working life by promoting staff know-how and innovation at Finnish workplaces". The first stage of the programme was implemented during 1996-1999 as part of the Government programme of Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen’s first Government. The second Lipponen Government decided to extend the programme until the end of 2003. The Ministry of Labour is in charge of programme implementation in cooperation with labour market and entrepreneurial organizations.

The FINWDP can provide support for Finnish companies, public bodies and other work organizations striving to improve their modes of operation. Most projects within the programme aim at operative and organizational changes. The projects must be workplace-initiated and aim at improvements both in productivity and the quality of working life, the management and staff must both make a commitment to implementing the projects, and the workplace itself should contribute at least 50 per cent of the project costs (30 per cent in the case of SMEs and small municipalities). The programme does not provide support for projects involving staff training or information campaigns only, or for product development or technology investments. In 1996-1999, it granted support to 284 projects, 227 of which were actual development projects. A sum of FIM 76 million (EUR 13 million) was contributed towards these projects from the Finnish State budget.

The sample selected for this study consisted of all development projects which received at least FIM 300,000 (EUR 50,000) in support. There were 79 such projects in all. The material for each of them was analysed with a view to discovering the extent to which the change processes of companies or public bodies showed features of concept-driven change. The most important materials were the final project report and the implementation plans, and in addition, management group minutes, interim reports and articles were also sometimes used. The final report was required to include a description of the situation at the outset of the project and the project’s basic starting points, a description of the development process, a report on project results, an evaluation of the method of implementation and effects, and information on suggested and implemented development measures.

It was possible to produce a sufficiently detailed description of the change process of 54 workplaces. The main reason why such descriptions could not be produced from the materials for all the projects was the incomplete information in some of the material available. This was not usually due to a poor standard of reporting as such, but generally more to the fact that several companies and public bodies often participated in one project, in which case the project report tended to focus on the project as a whole rather than on processes of change at individual workplaces.

There were 25 companies in industry and the building sector, 15 of which were in metals and engineering. There were eight companies in the private service sector, 20 municipalities or joint municipal boards and only one workplace in the central government sector. Nine of the municipal sector organizations were in social welfare and health care. This distribution corresponds fairly well to the distribution of total programme funding by sector. There were six small enterprises with under 100 employees, nine medium-sized enterprises with 100-499 employees and 18 big enterprises with a minimum of 500 employees. Further, there were four small municipalities with under 10,000 inhabitants, six medium-sized municipalities with 10,000–49,999 inhabitants and ten large municipalities.

For the analysis of the change processes, the 14 features of concept-driven change given in table 1 were arranged into seven dimensions, each divided into four levels (table 2). In three cases, several of the features in table 1 were merged into one dimension, while two of the original features were omitted altogether: the forefront of change lies in existing ‘brown field sites’ and the processes of organizational change are less conditioned by existing technical systems. The figures in brackets given for each dimension in table 2 refer to the features in table 1 that that dimension covers.

Table 2. Dimensions of concept-driven change and their levels.

Table 3 shows how the processes of change in the 54 workplaces studied were divided in these seven dimensions. Table 4 shows the companies’ and public bodies’ averages for the dimensions separately.

Table 3. Concept-driven change at 54 Finnish workplaces: distribution into levels.

Table 4. Concept-driven change at 54 Finnish workplaces: averages for companies and public bodies (on a scale from 0-3).

The change processes differed distinctly where the Intensity of development work was concerned, dividing fairly evenly among the three highest levels. About one in four cases was placed on level 3, where the pace of change is rapid and change affects the entire organization and all operations at the same time. Almost all of these were small or medium-sized enterprises; only two were big enterprises and one a public body. The majority of public bodies were on level 1. Some of their change processes might have focused on the entire organization and all operations, but typically, change proceeded at a slow pace. The difference between companies and public bodies was greatest in the case of this dimension, something which was certainly to be expected, especially where the pace of change was concerned, in view of the different targets of these two types of organization.

The dimension Extent of the aims of development work showed the distinctions between change processes less clearly than the Intensity of development work. Over half of the cases were classified as level 3, where change has aims involving productivity and the quality of working life which are given the same emphasis and which support each other. Meanwhile, there were few cases on levels 0 and 1. This distribution was not surprising, since one of the principles for FINWDP projects is that they should promote both productivity and the quality of working life. The cases on the two lowest levels were, with only one exception, industrial enterprises in whose change processes the sole emphasis was on productivity. This was the only dimension in which public bodies did better than companies in terms of concept-driven change.

The dimension Operating policy of development work produced about the same level of differentiation among the change processes as the Intensity of development work. The distribution here was nevertheless much more clearly polarized between levels 1 and 3. Over one third of the cases were on the top level, where change is guided by a clear policy set down by management, and they represented all the main sectors. About half of the change processes in public bodies were nevertheless on the two lowest levels here, too. This may reflect the fact that management and development have a more complicated nature in public bodies than in companies. Because public bodies have more operational targets and stakeholders to take into account, and the vocational or professional orientation of staff is often more pronounced than it is in companies, it is probable that their management rarely have the opportunity to formulate a clear policy for change independently.

The Development organization can take a number of forms. It is typically made up of the following actors or forums (Gustavsen et al. 1996, 46-48):

1. Steering group: Usually made up of representatives of management and personnel groups and, in some cases, of other parties actively involved in development work, for instance team leaders and representatives of occupational health care.

2. Project groups: Usually made up of representatives of middle management and shop floor teams involved in the actual development projects.

3. Working groups: These are production groups which carry out practical development functions alongside their production work.

4. Discussions and workplace meetings: These are forums where a broad-based group of representatives of management and employees deal with development issues.

5. Resource group: Usually made up of experts from outside or inside the company, who are used in order to support development if needed. Examples of such experts include external consultants, people involved in the development of other companies, or occupational health experts.

With a single exception, some kind of development organization could be found in all companies and public bodies. More than one in three cases were, in fact, on level 3. At this level, development organizations could be considered comprehensive in the sense that all or nearly all the actors or forums listed above formed part of them. Level 3 included cases from all the main sectors. There was only a small difference between companies and public bodies in favour of the former.

The Workforce mobilization dimension differentiated very clearly between processes of change. Nearly two out of three were on level 1, where there was not very broad mobilization for one reason or another. Only eight cases made it to level 3, where mobilization was extensive. All but two of these cases were companies. Nevertheless, companies on the whole were only slightly ahead of public bodies.

One of the targets announced by the management of most projects was to achieve comprehensive personnel participation at least in support of implementing change, and in many cases also to draw on personnel expertise actually in planning the project. In many cases, however, these ambitions were not successful. Typically, one reason was that employees took a reserved or even distrustful attitude to the project. The background might be a deeply rooted general atmosphere of distrust in the workplace or general uncertainty about how the project would benefit the employees. Municipal-sector organizations, especially, had experienced strict economy measures in the 1990s, and employees may therefore have interpreted the project as part of another rationalization scheme.

In some sectors, such as continuous process production or teaching, the nature of the work process as such made it very difficult to find time for joint development efforts. At least two service-sector enterprises found the large proportion of fixed-term or part-time staff an obstacle to employee commitment, while the obstacle in the case of another enterprise in the same sector was that it was very much a family business. In many projects, however, the employees’ attitude to change was neither unanimously favourable nor suspicious, but instead varied from one individual or employee group to the next.

The Critical mass of development work dimension showed companies and public bodies at their furthest from the ideal of concept-driven change. Only six of them reached level 3, where development was supported by a systematic exchange of experiences with other workplaces. Most cases had had some kind of exchange of experiences during the process of change, but more than one in three did not mention any such activity. All but one of the cases on the highest level were medium or large enterprises, and these may be assumed to have better opportunities than small companies for exchanging ideas with other companies. On the whole, companies were well ahead of public bodies where this dimension was concerned.

Three of the companies which had been engaged in systematic exchange of experiences had set up a standard practice and trained their employees in mutual benchmarking, in addition to which the companies communicated with a research and development programme abroad. A fourth company had also created a systematic practice for benchmarking and was active in regional cooperation networks which included other companies and supporting institutions such as training providers. A fifth company had an active teamwork support network made up of representatives of central management and the various production units. The company also exchanged information within its project with two other Finnish companies in the same field. The municipal organization which attained the highest level for this dimension had been involved in an international benchmarking scheme for cities for a number of years.

The Continuity of development work dimension was the most difficult of all the seven dimensions to evaluate. More than one in four cases provided a description showing that the company or public body concerned had a clearly defined and adequately resourced strategy for the period after the end of the project supported by the programme. Almost half of all cases only reached level 1, however. Level 3 included cases from all the main sectors. Companies were, however, clearly ahead of public bodies. This may be connected with the fact that more companies than public bodies had a clear policy for change.

The material yielded 17 cases which attained the highest level in at least four dimensions. Ten of these represented industry, two the private service sector, four the municipal sector and one the State sector. If this were used as the criterion for concept-driven change, the result would be about one third of companies, which would correspond quite well with the Swedish material. Gustavsen et al. (1996) used the development organization as the key criterion in differentiating between workplaces. Based on the Finnish material, the clearest differentiation factor was, however, the operating policy of development work, and in this dimension, all the workplaces with concept-driven change attained level 3.

The operating policy of development work – umbrella concepts

The policies of development work differed from one workplace to the next. Certain umbrella concepts which link them or differentiate between them can, however, be found in the background to these policies, and these illustrate the discursive framework of development work at the workplaces and link their respective policies to international debate on workplace development.

At nine out of the 22 workplaces which attained level 3 in the dimension concerning the operating policy of development work, quality in some form or another was such an umbrella concept. Even so, there was considerable project variation among them. At five workplaces, process organization (team or network organization) was the umbrella concept, while three had the concept the learning organization. Two workplaces were striving for a new business concept and three cases were working on a change in management practices, corporate culture or work community without a clearly distinguishable umbrella concept.

If we extend this overview to all 54 workplaces, we find that there is no single dominant umbrella concept in workplace development in Finland. The situation is similar to that in Sweden (Gustavsen et al. 1996, 141-142). Another observation is that workplaces take a very pragmatic approach to different management practices. In very few workplaces was development work structured on the discursive level according to any specific management practice.

Loosely defined quality projects were the most common in the material, which is not at all surprising in an international perspective. Bengtsson and Ljungström (1998) suggest that quality management replaced sociotechnically-inspired work development as a more progressive and ‘trendy’ approach in the 1990s in Sweden, too. Quality management and work development, or even the principles of participatory approaches in general, have many similarities, but also many differences. Studies show that the effects of quality management from the point of view of traditional development of the quality of work and working life may vary a great deal from one workplace to the next (Bengtsson & Ljungström 1998; Cole et al. 1993; Edwards et al. 1998; Lawler 1994).

Quality management originally developed in an industrial mass production environment, initially in Japan and later in the United States. Practical application of this system at Finnish workplaces is coloured by a number of factors which depend on the organizational and general social context. For the quality projects in the material for this article, adoption of individual tools, methods or quality systems was far less typical than a more comprehensive view of quality as an umbrella concept for the development of management practices and work organization. Improvement of working conditions and employee working capacity had also been turned into explicit key targets in some quality projects. This may be a reflection of the fact that Finland has powerful workplace-level systems for occupational safety and health by international standards, and at many workplaces, the aim has been to integrate these systems into the development of processes, work organization, management and employee skills.

None of the 54 cases applied process reorganization based on BPR discourse as a key approach. This is interesting in the sense that, especially in the Anglo-American world, BPR reached a position that challenged that of quality management in the corporate rhetoric of change in the early 1990s (De Cock & Hipkin 1997; Micklethwait & Wooldridge 1996). BPR, furthermore, is the school of process management which places the most forceful emphasis on the importance of process innovation — an aim which the FINWDP also shared.

The explanation for this may lie in the fact that BPR has acquired a reputation for being a cost-cutting management practice — consequently leading to personnel cuts as well. Comparison studies in the UK and Australia have, for instance, shown that in companies in both countries, BPR was the most successful method for cutting costs out of 12 new practices studied, but it was less successful than many of the other practices in attaining targets such as improved quality or customer responsiveness (Morrison et al. 1998; Pepper et al. 1998). FINWDP, meanwhile, being a public funding programme, aimed to promote growth in business operations and employee numbers. It is also possible that BPR has never fitted in very well with Finnish industrial relations in general from the start, as it emphasizes rapid, radical changes forcefully controlled by management from the top down. BPR as a concept has taken on such negative connotations that companies and consultants in Finland now prefer to talk about ‘process development’ in general, without bringing the BPR ideology into it at all.

Workforce mobilization as an Achilles heel

The claim by Gustavsen et al. (1996) that the front-line Swedish workplaces had improved their ability to rapidly implement operative and organizational changes with the help of the concept-driven model should be seen against the background of criticism levelled against Swedish and Norwegian workplace development programmes. According to Naschold (1993; 1994), the five-year period typical of these programmes was too short a time to promote change processes in the workplace, and to disseminate experiences and create the cooperation networks needed. Gustavsen et al. in effect defended the five-year period of the Working Life Fund Programme in saying that workplaces had succeeded in speeding up their change processes by using the concept-driven model. They could not, however, provide any solid empirical proof that this was in fact the case.

It is very difficult to predict the time required for operative and organizational change, as change processes are characterized by uncertainty. It is thus difficult to plan change processes and the organizational learning they require in advance with any degree of certainty; in fact, the process does not progress in a linear fashion anyway, but is more cyclical in nature, progressing, furthermore, with varying degrees of intensity at its different stages. It is possibly even becoming increasingly difficult to predict the time needed for operative and organizational change, as the operating environment of companies is becoming more dynamic. According to Ståhle and Grönroos (2000), more and more companies are operating in an environment were one should talk of ‘continuous innovation’ and ‘management in chaos’ rather than ‘controlled development’.

From the perspective of the concept-driven model, broad workforce mobilization is one of the first preconditions for achieving the required organizational sensitivity and flexibility in relation to change. Companies and public bodies which have a clear policy for development work can be assumed to be better equipped for mobilizing their workforce than others. Broad mobilization is difficult, not to say impossible, without such a clear policy (Cole et al. 1993). In itself, however, it is not enough for mobilization. Seven workplaces, or nearly one in three out of the entire material, where the policy for change was classified as level 3, only attained level 1 in workforce mobilization, which means mobilization was far from broad. The same number of workplaces in this group did, however, mobilize their workforce with great success, reaching level 3 in that dimension, too.

The material available does not allow for a definitive answer to why certain companies and public bodies which had a clear policy had so little success in their workforce mobilization. Short descriptions of the seven cases in question do, however, suggest a number of obstacles:

In a medium-sized enterprise in the metals and engineering sector, a new management system was ‘trickled’ down through the organization, and during the project period, the training demanded by the system was only provided for foremen and occupational safety experts. A quality project in a large State-sector organization applied a similar approach of ‘trickling’ down. Broad mobilization was hampered by rigid regulatory control, a hierarchical organization structure and a territorial-minded civil service culture. In two medium-sized enterprises in the mechanical wood-processing industry, management-employee relations were burdened by mutual mistrust based on disagreements on, amongst other things, the wage system. In a large maintenance service company in the forest industry, mobilization was hindered to some extent by a fear that certain operations might be outsourced. The same problems also overshadowed the development work in a major municipal educational organization. This organization had the additional problem that the time set aside for development work was inadequate. In a small service-sector enterprise, the employees did not even consider the typical work in the sector a career at all, but tended to see it as a job to tide them over some specific period, for instance while they were studying to qualify for another sector altogether. The fact that the majority of the employees saw their work in a very instrumental manner constituted an insuperable obstacle to management efforts to mobilize the employees.

Workforce mobilization in support of change cannot be achieved without the consent of that workforce. Employees may withhold their consent for a number of reasons. The level of trust in management-employee relations is a key distinction between workplaces in this respect. The features common to all the workplaces which succeeded in broadly mobilizing their workforce was that they did not have any serious problems in their management-employee relations when the development work started. Typically, such problems might otherwise be that employees worry about their job security in the face of change, and that there is tension in negotiations between management and employee groups.

Building high-trust industrial relations is usually a long process, because the nature of these relations is a reflection of the entire cultural foundation of management. Thus if the starting point is deep distrust between the parties involved, it is difficult or even impossible to build high-trust relations during a two or three-year development project. Workforce participation in planning and implementing change and close cooperation and interaction between management and employees at the workplace during the change process are, however, crucial in the long term for creating a framework which reinforces trust.

This article is an attempt to estimate how extensively Finnish workplaces have applied the concept-driven model and the extent to which this has better enabled them to implement operative and organizational change. There is no completely comparable empirical material available in Finland. It nevertheless seems that development is pursued intensively at many workplaces these days and that the aim is to introduce change over a broad front all at one time. Consequently, within many of the present projects development work focused on the entire personnel and all functions at once. The aims set down for the development work were also quite comprehensive. The projects themselves were selective, however, because one of the criteria for receiving support from the FINWDP in the first place was that the projects in question had to promote change in modes of operation which would improve productivity and the quality of working life.

The workplaces were furthest from the concept-driven model with regard to workforce mobilization and the attainment of critical mass in support of development. Based on the material, these appear to be the weaknesses of Finnish workplaces on their way towards improved capacity for change. It is far from easy to find fast-acting solutions for workforce mobilization. The poor capacity of these workplaces to mobilize their workforce for change may signal that a genuinely participatory approach to development, based on actual personnel participation, may still be fairly superficial at many Finnish workplaces. Empirical comparison supports the view that traditional expert-based approach to development is still in a stronger position in Finland than in Sweden, where participatory approaches to development have been actively supported by different programmes and other public policy measures since the 1970s (NUTEK 1999, 110-112). The lack of exchange of experiences between workplaces in support of development in the Finnish material is a sign of a culture where workplaces are not used to enriching their own development work with the help of experiences from other workplaces.

About one in three out of the 54 companies and public bodies included in the empirical analysis could be considered examples of application of the concept-driven change model, and this is about the same proportion as in the Swedish Working Life Fund Programme, even if a direct comparison cannot be made. A clear attempt towards development work in accordance with the concept-driven model was evident at many Finnish workplaces, but these are still at the ‘forefront of change’, as in Sweden. There were only a few companies and public bodies which were successful in workforce mobilization and in achieving critical mass in support of development work. The workplaces applied a wide variety of approaches to their development work and the policies which guided change were based on a variety of umbrella concepts. The approaches and umbrella concepts selected showed no clear connection with how consistently the companies fulfilled the criteria for concept-driven change. In the case of workforce mobilization, for instance, how the approaches and concepts were conveyed to the employees by the management was probably more important than what they actually were.

The new forms of direct participation generated by development organizations and workforce mobilization can either replace, supplement or have neutral effects on existing forms of representative employee participation. In Finland, these consist mainly of codetermination and occupational safety systems. The institutional position of these systems is strong in Finland by comparison with many European countries, as they have both a legislative and a contractual basis (Regalia 1995). The material seems to indicate that no new forms of direct participation have been used to replace them. The importance of the codetermination system was emphasized merely by the fact that one of the conditions for receiving support from the FINWDP was that representatives of management and employees had to process and approve the project plan together and that there had to be a working group made up of representatives of both groups at the workplace which would monitor implementation of the project. The group’s members were, in practice, often the same management representatives and shop stewards or comparable employee representatives who also held key positions in the codetermination and negotiation system.

Occupational safety experts took the initiative in some projects, and the occupational safety manager and occupational safety delegates were represented in the steering groups of some projects which focused on issues within their expertise, but beyond that, the role played by the formal occupational safety system in the change process was purely incidental. Certain occupational safety delegates did, however, participate actively in the development work, for instance teambuilding with the help of external consultants or researchers. At least two companies in the metal and engineering sector also tried consciously to give the occupational safety committee a more active role by allocating to it new types of duties during the change process.

A number of new features seem to have emerged in the change processes at Finnish workplaces in the second half of the 1990s. The concept-driven change model is one way of striving to analyse the holistic and systemic nature of organizational change, an aspect considered in certain recent studies to be a typical feature of the most innovative high-performance workplaces (Huselid 1995; Ichniowski et al. 1996; Whittington et al. 1999). The present article cannot, however, make any real contribution to the discussion on that subject, as the nature of the material available precluded uniform and comparable evaluation of the results of the change processes at the workplaces concerned.

Tuomo Alasoini
Ministry of Labour, P.O. Box 34, 00023 Government, Finland
tuomo.alasoini@mol.fi

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