Participants:
From RU - Centre for Working Environment and Working Life: Helge Hvid, Annette Kamp, Klaus T. Nielsen and Sidsel Lond Grosen
From Copenhagen Business School - Centre for Enterprise Development and Management: Preben Melander, Christa Breum Amhøj, Ole Hinz and Marie Larsen Ryberg

Project objectives:
The project's objective is to explore how self-management and standardization can be implemented in order to contribute to the improvement of the psychosocial working environment.

Short description of the project:
Self-management combined with standardization has in recent years played an important role in efforts to improve quality and efficiency in both the public and private sectors. From a working environment perspective the simultaneous developments towards self-management and greater standardization are often at odds with each other.

The combination may enhance the potential negative working environment consequences of both self-management, in the form of boundaryless work, and standardization, in the form of monotonous work and lack of meaning. The reverse can also be the case: Standardization can help to reduce the potentially negative working environment consequences of self-management, by reducing complexity and creating more certainty. Self-management may also, under certain conditions, contribute to reducing the negative working environment consequences of standardization by providing autonomy within the framework of standardization. Whether the reconciling of standardization and the consideration for the working environment succeeds, will depend on how self-management and standardization unfold in practice - in other words it depends on how a local 'translation' of standardization tools such as management systems and IT-enabled standardization tools to local practices takes place.

This issue has only been studied to a very limited extent in working environment research. The project's aim is therefore to generate knowledge about how improvements can be made to the psychosocial working environment in the interaction between self-management and standardization. The empirical points of interest are standardizing technologies and professionalism. The project works with the following research issues:

• Examination of how self-management and standardization are put into practice and interact; the role of technology and professionalism in various sectors and how this affects the working environment.

• Development of knowledge and concepts concerning how standardization and self-management can lead to a good working environment.

• Development of recommendations on the implementation and support of such processes in a manner where the working environment is taken into consideration.

The project issue is explored in two sectors within the public sector and two sectors within the private sector, where we know that the project's problems are in evidence: elderly care and public schools, programmers in software development and the financial sector. The developments of the last 10 years in the various sectors will be identified. The further analysis is based on case studies of two care centres, two elementary schools, two software development companies and two bank branches. In the process of knowledge generation and dissemination, practitioners from the sectors will be involved in discussions of the project during its various phases.

Timeframe:
April 2009 - March 2012

Contact:
Helge Hvid, hh@ruc.dk