Participative redesign projects in Norway, summarizing the first five years of a strategy to democratize the design process in work organization

Abstract

This paper focuses on a series of one-year projects in participative redesign of work and work organizations in Norway. The projects began as a natural consequence of the need for a diffusion strategy to follow up the initial ‘demonstration experiments’ in Phase B of the earlier Industrial Democracy Programme. The distinguishing features of the new Norwegian strategy with respect to the characteristics of the projects have been:

• a focus on redesign of existing bureaucratic organizational structures;

• an emphasis on those conditions which facilitate change processes in the companies based on joint learning among workers, managers and others;

• a demand for participating companies to commit themselves to a one-year programme which includes three consecutive workshops and which require substantial ‘homework’ and use of own resources during the intermediate periods.

• participating companies act as nodes in a social network for exchange of ideas and further diffusion in terms of recruitment of new companies.

This summary relies in part on a more extensive monograph as yet available only in Norwegian.