Creating Sustainable Work Systems

Developing Social Sustainability

Peter Docherty, Mari Kira, A.B. (Rami) Shani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135980221
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Since the first edition of this book was published, the subject of sustainability has risen to the forefront of thinking in almost every subject within business and management. Tackling the latest developments and integrating practical perspectives with rigorous research, this new edition sheds light on a vital aspect of working life.

Current trends reveal that increasing intensity at work has major consequences at individual, organizational and societal levels. Sustainability in work systems thus requires a multi-stakeholder approach, emphasising a value-based choice to promote the concurrent development of various resources in the work system. This sustainability grows from intertwined individual and collective learning processes taking place within and between organizations in collaboration.

In exploring the development of sustainable work systems, this book analyzes these problems, and provides the basis for designing and implementing 'sustainable work systems' based on the idea of regeneration and the development of human and social resources. The authors, who are leading researchers and practitioners from around the world, consider the existing possibilities and emerging solutions and explore alternatives to intensive work systems.

1 What the world needs now is sustainable work systems

Peter Docherty, Mari Kira, and A.B. (Rami) Shani

Introduction

The working population in Europe is ageing. For example, in Germany people over 65 are projected to make up 30 percent of the population by 2035. One of the measures to guarantee the availability of workforce in this situation is to increase the retirement age—and this is what the German Parliament decided in March 2007. The retirement age was lifted from 65 to 67. There is an urgent need to support individual employees so that they will be able to continue to work to this age. It is an especially difficult challenge to ensure the sustainable work capacity of employees in shift work and in physically demanding manufacturing jobs. Two major German car manufacturers have initiated a research and development project with researchers from the University of Kassel. The project explores working conditions, organizational designs, technological solutions, and human resources management practices that can support the ageing workforce. The sustainability of human resources is dependent on the way work and organizations are designed. One day, there will be a 66-year-old worker assembling your next car (see Chapter 5).

The competitive nature of the software development industry led the top management team of a medium-sized software development company to search for mechanisms that would result in a sustainable new product development process. Following a study of alternative technologies and work design configurations, the study team recommended the utilization of a technology-based solution. Software Development Firm established a process for product development using a platform-based architecture. The technology utilized and the business/ organization design choices made, coupled with the integration of learning mechanisms, resulted in increased innovation, continuous improvement, and positive economic performance (see Chapter 6).

Sustainable Enterprise Executive Roundtable (SEER) is a project of the University of Southern California Center for Sustainable Cities. Twenty-four business leaders—from companies such as the Port of Los Angeles, Disney, Toyota, Mattel, CDM, Volvo, and Waste Management—agreed to participate with researchers from the centre in discussions on possible synergies with regard to the movement of products, materials, and services through the Alameda Corridor, a major distribution channel for imported goods in the Los Angeles area. They agreed that the collaboration would focus on making the transport system more sustainable in terms of increased efficiencies, savings, innovations, better environmental outcomes, and stakeholder satisfaction for the participating companies. The firms agreed to meet quarterly and to engage in at least one concrete project. Multiple projects were launched, such as a project that focused on creating strategies for optimizing the journey of a standard transport container unit and simplifying/ greening supply chains (see Chapter 12).

The politicians in Lidköping, Sweden, feared that health care efficiency and efficacy did not realize their potential due to the separate organization of primary health care clinics, hospitals, and municipal after-care. In 2002, these three groups of health care providers formed a development coalition to improve their health care system as a whole. Their first move was to launch projects to develop patient pathways for different patient groups, such as the elderly (aged over 70), diabetes patients, and dementia patients. The projects involved personnel from the different care providers, patients, and their relatives. The resulting pathways became the formal infrastructure for the flow of information about and care to patients. The project resulted in a radical reduction in the number of steps taken in connection with patient care, the elimination of waiting times for reception at the hospital medical clinic (with the exception of heart ailments), reduced the number of referrals and visits to the medical clinic by 15–18 percent, improved communication and relations among staff in different clinics, increased awareness and learning of the staff regarding the patient pathways, and led to the continuation of the study of patient pathways for other patient groups. The three health-care providers decided to form a permanent sustainable development coalition of the health-care system as a whole in 2005 (see Chapter 11).

Each of these vignettes briefly describes a case that addresses different sustainability challenges. All attempted to help work systems become more innovative and more adaptable, to improve continuously and/or to attain some long-term complex system purpose. As we can see from the vignettes, different levels of work systems seem to attract the focus of sustainability efforts. Creating sustainable work systems can be examined by focusing on work design, by focusing on change, and/or by focusing on systems or networks. In this book, we will illustrate and examine the practice and theory that centres on creating sustainable work systems in different settings, organizations, sectors, and nations.

In this chapter, we present the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development. These are broad concepts covering such fields as ecology, sociology, social psychology, and economics. This book focuses on work systems, on organizations and groups of organizations—networks, coalitions, supply chains—and on social sustainability. Naturally, the different dimensions of sustainability are interdependent; these interdependencies are broached where they are of particular relevance in the examples presented. After a general presentation of the concept of sustainability in work systems, we relate this to several of what we regard as the main definitions of the concept. We then discuss some of the features of the concept that may give rise to problems in its application, especially the issue that the concept is distinctly value-loaded. Another related and possibly sensitive feature of sustainability is that its application involves learning, and that this learning is of a deep nature, namely second-order or double-loop learning. Finally, before presenting the organization of the book, we address why it is particularly timely to address work system sustainability at this point in history.

Sustainability in work systems

Sustainability is most often defined as a general worldview according to which people should strive to fulfil their needs in a manner such that the ability of future generations to fulfil their needs is not endangered (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). Sustainability in this sense means protecting the richness of the world’s resources in such a way that their utilization does not destroy them but rather leaves equal opportunity to future generations to benefit from them as well. The sustainability concept has thus a value dimension stating that no population has the right to devour the world’s resources for the satisfaction of its needs—much less its wants and ambitions.

In this book, we discuss sustainability in the context of work systems: private and public, for-profit and nonprofit organizations of different sorts that have been formed for the purpose of work. In the systems we study, the defining and unifying activity of their members is working. We define work as an intentional value-creating process. This general definition gains meaning with the specification of the goals and rules, resources, and context for the work process. These parameters are related to the stakeholders in the process—workers, investors, suppliers, customers, and communities. The resources are financial, material, physical, intellectual, and technological. The context is cultural, ecological, economic, historical, and social. Addressing sustainability in a work system means, therefore, addressing all these elements that form it, influence it, and are influenced by it. This generally entails recognizing a broader circle of stakeholders than is commonly acknowledged: not only local communities (already a stretch for some), but the communities that customers and participants in the entire supply chain live in, and their ecologies.

Sustainability entails concurrent development in the economic, ecological, human, and social resources engaged in work processes. A sustainable work system is able to function in its environment and to achieve its economic or operational goals. This functioning also entails development in various human and social resources engaged in its operations. In a sustainable work system, employees’ capacity to deal with the world’s demands grows through work-based learning, development, and well-being. The growth of social resources is secured through equal and open interaction among the various stakeholders, leading to better mutual understanding and a greater capacity for collaboration. The diversity and regeneration potential of ecological resources are safeguarded as well. Central questions in the book are: How can we create and maintain economically viable work systems that also contribute to human, social, and ecological sustainability in a positive manner? How can we engage human and social resources in work systems without expending them, but rather by supporting their growth? How can we ensure the continued functioning of the processes that regenerate human and social resources?

A work system cannot simply satisfy certain needs of certain stakeholders. It has to be able to satisfy the needs of many stakeholders. Moreover, we cannot focus only on short-term, static efficiencies such as productivity and profitability; we must also focus on long-term, dynamic efficiencies such as learning and innovation. A sustainable work system does not merely make trade-offs between the short term and the long term or between different stakeholders, but aims to attain a just balance in development for them all. Past unsustainable decisions in work systems and in societies have something in common: they have all suboptimized, focused too much on one or more stakeholders at the expense of others. Recent management rationalizing methodologies have achieved marked cost reductions but have given the workforce less employment security and more intense and stressful work, with radically increased losses of time through sickness (Rydh 2002; Kira 2003; Askenazy et al. 2006; Green 2006). For many companies, the “business of business” is only seen as “business,” yet many of the new “economy-first remedies” for lagging competitiveness have exacerbated the unsustainable exploitation of human, social, and natural resources without having met the competitiveness requirements of even the immediate future (Docherty et al. 2002). These interventions, in effect, have failed even on their own terms; the still bigger problem is to align an understanding of the requirements of competitiveness with those that represent long-term sustainability.

We perceive the diversity and richness of work system resources as an important source for, and an important result of, sustainability. A work system formed by diverse kinds of people and diverse tangible and intangible resources is more sustainable than a uniform work system relying only on a limited set of resources, strategies, and responses. Work systems never stay the same. The diversity in such systems allows them to respond to environmental challenges and opportunities in a creative, changing manner. Therefore, the search for sustainability has to also be the search for ensuring diversity in a work system through work design, work-organization design, and technology development measures.

Thus, a sustainable work system is definitely not in a static or steady state—it changes continually as a social and technical system. During its life cycle, a sustainable work system strives toward a higher level of development—but, evolving along with natural cycles of change, it may also transform beyond recognition or even cease to exist. Sustainability simply means that the existence of a work system has created a platform for the future existence of new work systems and processes; its heritage is resource-regenerative rather than resource-consuming for future work processes.

To summarize, some of the principles for sustainable work systems are:

• The operation of a sustainable work system is aimed at the regeneration of the resources it utilizes—human, social, material, and natural resources.
• Moreover, the development of one type of resource does not exploit resources of other types. For instance, material gains are not achieved at the expense of human, social, or natural resources. Similarly, any actor in a sustainable work system does not seek to gain at the expense of other actors.
• A sustainable work system does not strive to secure its existence by exploiting resources external to it. A sustainable work system “gives back” to society rather than simply exploiting the resources made available to it by its social and natural environment. A sustainable work system takes some measure of responsibility for externalized costs and “free goods.”
• Since a sustainable work system has to be able to regenerate resources of different types and take into account the legitimate needs of different stakeholders, we need more complex tools for understanding what a work system is and how it functions. Oversimplified models of work systems lead to oversimplified models of responsibility and regeneration.

Defining sustainability and sustainable development

The United Nations (UN) has played a key role in the development of sustainability concepts and the global sustainability movement. The issue of sustainability was initially broached in an international context at the UN conference on the Human Environment in 1972. A major step forward came when the UN formed the World Commission on Environment and Development, often referred to as the Brundtland Commission, after its chairperson. Its report, entitled Our Common Future (1987), provided the now classical definition of sustainable development as:

development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of “needs,” in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

We read several important meanings in this definition. First, it has a principle dimension stating that no single generation has the right to consume the world’s resources for the satisfaction of its needs. Instead, every generation has the responsibility to safeguard the resources it uses and the processes through which these resources form or are regenerated. The definition thus emphasizes protecting the richness of the world’s resources through their preservation, regeneration and development. Second, the definition emphasizes the satisfaction of needs, not wants. The sustainability concept has thus a priority dimension that sets the satisfaction of needs by all people now and in the future ahead of the satisfaction of the wants and ambitions of privileged people in the present. Third, the definition concludes that the developmental state of technology and social organizations has a strong impact on the environment. The concept thus also has a progress dimension, according to which ecological sustainability can be achieved through social and technological innovations. Even though ecological resources have been damaged and put at risk because of some technological and social innovations that have aimed to achieve economic goals, it will be possible to reverse the ecological damage and reduce the risks only...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: I
• Foreword: II
• 1 What the world needs now is sustainable work systems
• PART I Focusing value frameworks
• PART II Focusing work and work systems
• PART III Focusing change in sustainable organizations
• PART IV Focusing systems
• PART V Future of sustainable work systems