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Measuring the dynamics of organisations and work: proposed guidelines for collecting and interpreting data on organisational change and its economic and social impacts

Final Report Summary - MEADOW (Measuring the dynamics of organisations and work: proposed guidelines for collecting and interpreting data on organisational change and its economic and social impacts)

MEADOW brought together a multi-disciplinary consortium of 14 partners from 9 European countries with an established track record in the design and implementation of both national and international survey instruments in areas that are complementary to the measurement of organisational change, including innovation, the use of ICT, working conditions, human resources management, and skills and training.

MEADOW set itself the goal of integrating the perspectives of both producers and users by including research teams that have designed and implemented national survey instruments for measuring organisational change and innovation at the employer level and work restructuring at the employee level, as well as experienced users of such surveys. The conceptual framework drew upon the work of internationally recognised scholars with proven track records in the study of the micro-level processes of creating, implementing and diffusing new organisational practices within and between firms or establishments, including the way such micro dynamics are linked to corporate structure and governance, and the way company-level processes are shaped by the wider sectoral and institutional contexts.

The MEADOW Project was designed to set out guidelines for collecting and interpreting harmonised data at the European level on organisational change and its economic and social impacts. These guidelines provide a framework within which existing European surveys on organisational change and work structuring could evolve towards comparability, as well as providing norms for the construction of new survey instruments in the field. They will provide an instrument for improving the empirical basis of research and policy on the relation between organisational change and key economic and social indicators in the knowledge-based economy, including productivity growth and innovative performance, and sustainable social equality in terms of access to jobs, work environments, and influence at the workplace.

A central task in preparing the MEADOW guidelines was the development of an appropriate measurement framework. A challenge was developing a framework adequately focussed to provide useful guidance in terms of providing useful information about the causal relations shaping organisational change, while at the same time being sufficiently general to be of relevance to a wide range of theoretical perspectives. The difficulties in finding such a framework are compounded by the MEADOW objective of measuring change and its impacts at both the employer and employee levels.

The framework is based on an overview of major theories of structure and change in public and private organisations as well as a background report on the state of art in surveys of organisational change. The framework draws attention to the driving forces behind organisational change, the way management policies, practices and techniques impact on the organisational design which in turn affects performance and employee outcomes. The figure can be interpreted from two perspectives:
(1) from the perspective of the individual organisation, the target of an employer survey, and
(2) from the perspective of the individual employee as a member of the organisation and living with the social consequences of it, the target of an employee survey.

MEADOW used a structure to assure the timely dissemination of the project's on-going activities and results to a wide range of actors: policy makers, including those responsible for data collection activities, at the national and EU levels; other relevant stakeholders including trade unions, employers associations, educational institutions, and the scientific community within the ERA; the global policy and scientific communities, including those in such fast-growing developing nations as China and India.

The MEADOW website (please see http://www.Meadow-project.eu online) has been effectively used over the course of the project both for internal discussion and dissemination of documents across the MEADOW consortium, and for the wider European and international dissemination of the MEADOW project. Steps were successfully taken to assure high Google visibility of the project's website and the website address has been disseminated to key institutional supporters of the project including the OECD, Eurostat, EFILWC and DG Employment.

The first MEADOW newsletter was prepared during year 2 of the project and the second MEADOW newsletter during year 3. Whereas the first newsletter was mainly devoted to presenting the overall structure and aims of the project, the second focussed mainly on year 2 accomplishments, including the Aalborg stakeholders' meeting, and on describing events planned for year 3 including the final MEADOW stakeholders meeting to be held in Brussels and plans by Statistics Sweden to undertake a full-scale test of the MEADOW employer-level questionnaire. The second newsletter also provided a general discussion of the policy relevance of developing harmonised surveys of organisational change and its impacts and provided an overview of selected national framework programmes for promoting organisational change and innovation. Further, the newsletter contains links to the downloadable documents referred to above. Copies of the newsletters have been sent to all institutions and persons that have contributed to the project's general assembly and stakeholder meetings. Drawing on the national contacts of each of the MEADOW partners, an international mailing list was created and the newsletter was widely disseminated electronically in this manner. Each MEADOW partner was provided with 50 printed versions of the newsletter to be used to further disseminate the project's ativities at meetings and conferences. A short description of the MEADOW project (the elevator pitch as labelled by advisory board members) addressed to the policy community (policy brief) has also been published and largely disseminated while preparing the Brussels conference. The newsletters and the policy brief have been made available on the website.

The project's advisory board provides strategic advice on dissemination activities and has been called upon to assist in making contact with key stakeholders at the national and European levels. The advisory board met four times over the life of the project, in April 2007, March 2008 and February 2008 and December 2009.

The project's institutional observers were invited to contribute to the project. Institutional observers are of three categories: international organisations, national statistical services and other organisations from developing countries and EU new Member States. The first two categories of institutional observers are especially well-placed to contribute to the project's dissemination strategy because of their central responsibilities for data collection and dissemination at the national, European and international levels. These institutions have been invited to contribute to the discussion in setting priorities and to interact informally in some of the work packages where they had specific interests. Certain of these institutional observers have been invited to follow up the project as members of the advisory board and helped by advising on contacts with stakeholders and dissemination.

Although the MEADOW project formally came to an end on 28 February 2010, a number of the MEADOW partners have expressed an interest in working together to investigate the possibilities for achieving the longer-term goal of carrying out a harmonised European survey of organisational change and its impacts. Various avenues for realising this ambition are being explored, including national level funding for full-scale surveys and European-level funding through the European Commission's Eighth Framework Programme. Two key initiatives in progress are the full-scale pilot surveys underway in Sweden and Denmark. In Sweden, the MEADOW employer survey has undergone a full-scale test with financing from VINNOVA (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems). The final version of MEADOW's employer questionnaire was used in a telephone interview based survey carried out by Statistics Sweden. The firms that were contacted were those that answered both the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) and Eurostat's model survey on firms' ICT usage earlier in 2009. There amounts to just over 1 000 firms with at least 20 employees and the linked administrative data will provide information on the work organisation of firms, work practices, strategies, innovation networks, ICT-use and economic impacts.

Work is also well-advanced in carrying out a full-scale test of the linked employer and employee survey in Denmark. The survey work is being subcontracted to Statistics Denmark. A telephone survey method is being adopted with interviews conducted with both employers and employees. The results will be used and disseminated by an interdisciplinary network of researchers. These two initiatives, building on the accomplishments of the three-year MEADOW project will contribute both to demonstrating the feasibility of carrying out harmonised surveys of organisational change and to showing their relevance for research and policy.