This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private s... more This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of firm-level organisational devices and governance mechanisms. The second concerns the relation between the introduction of new organisational methods and the firm’s innovative capacity. Multiple correspondence analysis is used to describe the relation between the use of innovative work methods and pay policies. The analysis shows that the policies of the British sample of firms display greater ‘coherence ’ than those of the French sample, in the sense that a more intensive use of the new organisational methods is more consistently associated with a more intensive use of the new pay policies. Ordered logit regression analysis shows that UK firms with positive expenditures on R&D are more likely to introduce new organisational methods than those not making such expenditures. This relation between the use of new organisational methods and investments in innovative capacity are not confirmed for the French case.
Recent work on national systems of innovation has argued that there are systemic relations betwee... more Recent work on national systems of innovation has argued that there are systemic relations between national labour market and education and training systems, and the dynamics of knowledge creation and innovation at the enterprise level (Amable 2003; Hall and Soskice 2001; Lorenz and Lundvall 2006; Whitley 2006). Building on the insights of this research,
The MEADOW Guidelines propose a measurement framework for collecting and interpreting internation... more The MEADOW Guidelines propose a measurement framework for collecting and interpreting internationally harmonised data on organisational change and its economic and social impacts for both private and public sector organisations. Reliable harmonised statistics on organisational change would provide the basis for effective benchmarking through the exchange of information on best practices across EU-member states and in this way could contribute directly to the success of European policy initiatives aimed at increasing the fl exibility and adaptability of organisations and employees while simultaneously improving the quality of jobs during economic booms as well as downturns. The MEADOW project (MEAsuring the Dynamics of Organisations and Work) is a European Commission funded Coordinating Action that brought together a multidisciplinary consortium of 14 partners from 9 European countries. The Meadow consortium has been actively supported by a number of key European and international in...
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. 1
has born the indelible print of the cognitive sciences. Indeed, to an important extent Simon'... more has born the indelible print of the cognitive sciences. Indeed, to an important extent Simon's work on organisations during the 1950s and 1960s can be understood as an effort to translate into the domain of organisational theory the understanding of human thinking in terms of problem-solving through heuristic search that he was contemporaneously developing with the information processing activities of the human brain with those of organisations can be seen clearly in the chapter of Organizations (March and Simon, 1958, Ch. 6) dealing with cognitive limits on rationality, where the routinised and problem solving responses of humans and organisations are treated in the same terms: Activity (individual or organisational) can usually be traced back to an environment stimulus of some sort… When a stimulus is of a kind that has been experienced repeatedly in the past, the response will ordinarily be highly routinized. When a stimulus is relatively novel, it will evoke problem-solving activity aimed initially at constructing a definition of the situation and then at developing one or more appropriate performance programs. This discussion led up to March and Simon's well-know definition of organisational routines as computing routines or programs. We will regard a set of activities as routinized, then, to the degree that choice has been simplified by the development of a fixed response to defined stimuli. If search has been eliminated, but a choice remains in the form of a clearly defined and systematic computing routine, we will still say that the activities are routinized. This quote points to another distinguishing feature of Simon's approach. The computer serves as model for understanding human cognition and response, something no doubt linked to Simon's view that the human brain and the computer are two members of a single family of artifacts, which he refers to as physical symbol systems. The computer is a member of an important family of artifacts called symbol systems, or more explicitly, physical symbol systems. Another important member of the family (some of us think, anthropomorphically, it is the most important) is the 3 human mind and brain. (Simon, 1996, p. 21) Lakoff (1987) has recently summarised the underlying premises of the physical symbol view of human cognitive architecture 1 , as well as pointing to its deep philosophical roots. The traditional view is a philosophical one. It has come out of two thousand years of philosophizing about the nature of reason… Modern attempts to …
It is widely recognised that while expenditures on research and development are important inputs ... more It is widely recognised that while expenditures on research and development are important inputs to successful innovation, these are not the only inputs. Further, rather than viewing innovation as a linear process, recent work on innovation in business and economics literatures characterises it as a complex and interactive process involving multiple feedbacks. These considerations imply that relevant indicators for innovation need to do more than capture material inputs such as R&D expenditures and human capital inputs. The main contribution of this paper is to develop EU-wide aggregate measures that are used to explore at the level of national innovation systems the relation between innovation and the organisation of work. In order to construct these aggregate measures we make use of micro data from two European surveys: the third European survey of Working Conditions and the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS-3). Although our data can only show correlations rather than causali...
Drawing on the results of the third European Survey on Working Conditions undertaken in the 15 me... more Drawing on the results of the third European Survey on Working Conditions undertaken in the 15 member nations of the European Union in 2000, this paper offers one of the first systematic comparisons of the adoption of new organisation forms across Europe. The paper is divided into five sections. The first describe the variables used to characterise work organisation in the 15 countries of the European Union and presents the results of the factor analysis and hierarchical clustering used to construct a 4-way typology of organisational forms, labelled the 'learning , 'lean , 'taylorist and 'traditional forms. The second section examines how the relative importance of the different organisational forms varies according to sector, firm size, occupational category, and certain demographic characteristics of the survey population. The third section makes use of multinomial logit analysis to assess the importance of national effects in the adoption of the different organisa...
The paper argues that there are a set of interrelations between systems of social protection, lab... more The paper argues that there are a set of interrelations between systems of social protection, labour market structure and work organisation that impact on firms' innovative performance and style (i.e. the relative importance of 'new-to-the market' vs. 'new to firm' innovation). Systems of protection combining high levels of unemployment protection with relatively low levels of employment protection may have an advantage in terms of the adoption of the forms of work organisation and knowledge exploration at the firm level that can lead to 'new to the market' and possibly radical innovation. This is related to the fact that organisations which compete on the basis of strategies of continuous knowledge exploration tend to have relatively porous organisational boundaries so as to permit the insertion of new knowledge and ideas from the outside. Job tenures tend to be short as careers are often structured around a series of discrete projects rather than advanc...
Recent surveys of workplace participation in the United States point to an ostensible paradox. De... more Recent surveys of workplace participation in the United States point to an ostensible paradox. Despite evidence that actively involving workers in shop-level decision-making can lead to significant and long-lasting improvements in productivity, only a small fraction of US companies have seen fit to confer meaningful participatory rights on their workers. This outcome may expose a systematic bias of the market against firms adopting participatory work organization, and a number of observers have argued in favor of external mandating of workplace participation on the grounds of market failure. Based on the comparative experience of Germany and France with mandated participation, I argue an equally important matter is how the wider industrial relations environment and the strategic choices of unions and employers impact on the effectiveness of legislation.
This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private s... more This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of firm-level organisational devices and governance mechanisms. The second concerns the relation between the introduction of new organisational methods and the firm’s innovative capacity. Multiple correspondence analysis is used to describe the relation between the use of innovative work methods and pay policies. The analysis shows that the policies of the British sample of firms display greater ‘coherence ’ than those of the French sample, in the sense that a more intensive use of the new organisational methods is more consistently associated with a more intensive use of the new pay policies. Ordered logit regression analysis shows that UK firms with positive expenditures on R&D are more likely to introduce new organisational methods than those not making such expenditures. This relation between the use of new organisational methods and investments in innovative capacity are not confirmed for the French case.
Recent work on national systems of innovation has argued that there are systemic relations betwee... more Recent work on national systems of innovation has argued that there are systemic relations between national labour market and education and training systems, and the dynamics of knowledge creation and innovation at the enterprise level (Amable 2003; Hall and Soskice 2001; Lorenz and Lundvall 2006; Whitley 2006). Building on the insights of this research,
The MEADOW Guidelines propose a measurement framework for collecting and interpreting internation... more The MEADOW Guidelines propose a measurement framework for collecting and interpreting internationally harmonised data on organisational change and its economic and social impacts for both private and public sector organisations. Reliable harmonised statistics on organisational change would provide the basis for effective benchmarking through the exchange of information on best practices across EU-member states and in this way could contribute directly to the success of European policy initiatives aimed at increasing the fl exibility and adaptability of organisations and employees while simultaneously improving the quality of jobs during economic booms as well as downturns. The MEADOW project (MEAsuring the Dynamics of Organisations and Work) is a European Commission funded Coordinating Action that brought together a multidisciplinary consortium of 14 partners from 9 European countries. The Meadow consortium has been actively supported by a number of key European and international in...
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. 1
has born the indelible print of the cognitive sciences. Indeed, to an important extent Simon'... more has born the indelible print of the cognitive sciences. Indeed, to an important extent Simon's work on organisations during the 1950s and 1960s can be understood as an effort to translate into the domain of organisational theory the understanding of human thinking in terms of problem-solving through heuristic search that he was contemporaneously developing with the information processing activities of the human brain with those of organisations can be seen clearly in the chapter of Organizations (March and Simon, 1958, Ch. 6) dealing with cognitive limits on rationality, where the routinised and problem solving responses of humans and organisations are treated in the same terms: Activity (individual or organisational) can usually be traced back to an environment stimulus of some sort… When a stimulus is of a kind that has been experienced repeatedly in the past, the response will ordinarily be highly routinized. When a stimulus is relatively novel, it will evoke problem-solving activity aimed initially at constructing a definition of the situation and then at developing one or more appropriate performance programs. This discussion led up to March and Simon's well-know definition of organisational routines as computing routines or programs. We will regard a set of activities as routinized, then, to the degree that choice has been simplified by the development of a fixed response to defined stimuli. If search has been eliminated, but a choice remains in the form of a clearly defined and systematic computing routine, we will still say that the activities are routinized. This quote points to another distinguishing feature of Simon's approach. The computer serves as model for understanding human cognition and response, something no doubt linked to Simon's view that the human brain and the computer are two members of a single family of artifacts, which he refers to as physical symbol systems. The computer is a member of an important family of artifacts called symbol systems, or more explicitly, physical symbol systems. Another important member of the family (some of us think, anthropomorphically, it is the most important) is the 3 human mind and brain. (Simon, 1996, p. 21) Lakoff (1987) has recently summarised the underlying premises of the physical symbol view of human cognitive architecture 1 , as well as pointing to its deep philosophical roots. The traditional view is a philosophical one. It has come out of two thousand years of philosophizing about the nature of reason… Modern attempts to …
It is widely recognised that while expenditures on research and development are important inputs ... more It is widely recognised that while expenditures on research and development are important inputs to successful innovation, these are not the only inputs. Further, rather than viewing innovation as a linear process, recent work on innovation in business and economics literatures characterises it as a complex and interactive process involving multiple feedbacks. These considerations imply that relevant indicators for innovation need to do more than capture material inputs such as R&D expenditures and human capital inputs. The main contribution of this paper is to develop EU-wide aggregate measures that are used to explore at the level of national innovation systems the relation between innovation and the organisation of work. In order to construct these aggregate measures we make use of micro data from two European surveys: the third European survey of Working Conditions and the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS-3). Although our data can only show correlations rather than causali...
Drawing on the results of the third European Survey on Working Conditions undertaken in the 15 me... more Drawing on the results of the third European Survey on Working Conditions undertaken in the 15 member nations of the European Union in 2000, this paper offers one of the first systematic comparisons of the adoption of new organisation forms across Europe. The paper is divided into five sections. The first describe the variables used to characterise work organisation in the 15 countries of the European Union and presents the results of the factor analysis and hierarchical clustering used to construct a 4-way typology of organisational forms, labelled the 'learning , 'lean , 'taylorist and 'traditional forms. The second section examines how the relative importance of the different organisational forms varies according to sector, firm size, occupational category, and certain demographic characteristics of the survey population. The third section makes use of multinomial logit analysis to assess the importance of national effects in the adoption of the different organisa...
The paper argues that there are a set of interrelations between systems of social protection, lab... more The paper argues that there are a set of interrelations between systems of social protection, labour market structure and work organisation that impact on firms' innovative performance and style (i.e. the relative importance of 'new-to-the market' vs. 'new to firm' innovation). Systems of protection combining high levels of unemployment protection with relatively low levels of employment protection may have an advantage in terms of the adoption of the forms of work organisation and knowledge exploration at the firm level that can lead to 'new to the market' and possibly radical innovation. This is related to the fact that organisations which compete on the basis of strategies of continuous knowledge exploration tend to have relatively porous organisational boundaries so as to permit the insertion of new knowledge and ideas from the outside. Job tenures tend to be short as careers are often structured around a series of discrete projects rather than advanc...
Recent surveys of workplace participation in the United States point to an ostensible paradox. De... more Recent surveys of workplace participation in the United States point to an ostensible paradox. Despite evidence that actively involving workers in shop-level decision-making can lead to significant and long-lasting improvements in productivity, only a small fraction of US companies have seen fit to confer meaningful participatory rights on their workers. This outcome may expose a systematic bias of the market against firms adopting participatory work organization, and a number of observers have argued in favor of external mandating of workplace participation on the grounds of market failure. Based on the comparative experience of Germany and France with mandated participation, I argue an equally important matter is how the wider industrial relations environment and the strategic choices of unions and employers impact on the effectiveness of legislation.
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Papers by Edward Lorenz