The Institutional Gap of the Information Society: a Challenge for the Social Dialogue

(an abstract from Hans J. Weissbach speect presented at People First, Dublin 1996)


As most of us may believe, increasing competition on global markets in combination with the decentralising potential of the new information and communication technologies is the main cause of the development of flexible enterprises. The flexibility needs of the enterprises have increased the need for the development of new types of work organisation, as :



The organisation of successful flexible enterprises is becoming more and more based on the management of processses and no longer on the performance of specialised functions. Thus workers have to perform a broad range of tasks instead of passing from one job to another. The strict boundaries between work and non-work become blurred. This is stated many times in scientific publications and official papers of the EC, e.g. in the Green paper on living and working in the information society, or in the First reflections of the High Level Expert Group to which I have to contribute some inputs. But what is often neglected in these papers, and to what I want to refer here, is the institutional and cultural aspect of the implementation of new types of work.

Has to be considered the fact that the transformation process of work takes place in a moment when society as a whole is speeding up its process of change, while many institutions of working-life do not. We are all observers of a rapid modernisation of values, life-styles, and knowledge resources as predicted by Alvin Toffler 20 years ago, and as it is stated by Virilio today for whom speeding up is one of the most important characteristics of the new society as a whole. We can also observe the growing desire of the individuals for enlarged autonomy and participation, and for more disponibility in their private lifes, as well as the rapidly increasing vertical and horizontal, national and international mobility.

In this process of change, the institutions are the week point. While most of the economic organisations adapt rather well to new market demands and people have accepted information technologies in their private and vocational lifes, basic institutions like education and law, vocational training and bargaining systems, unions and employers'associations seem to be no longer in congruence with the technical, economical, and social dimensions of change. To give some evidence for that, I will refer here to two examples which are important factors in the process of flexibilisation of the enterprises: teamwork and telework.

Teamwork

Today, we can observe a strong contradiction betwen the increasing level of competition between companies, profit centers, work groups, or even individuals within the workgroups on one hand, and the existing collective forms of learning, vocational training, work organisation, and bargaining on the other hand. Of course, I don't want to critisise here the fact of collectivity or social cohesion which has been and will always be a basic factor of work. I only want to point out that a conflict arises between the increasing competition enforced by market powers and the traditional institutions of working life and education which either ignore the new situation of growing uncertainty and competition, or adapt to the new demand for flexibility very quickly without being conscious about the destroying impact of that adaption on their traditional functions.

I aware of the low level of consciousness on this conflict in my role as an academic teacher. I often see young engineers and economists writing about the necessity of teamwork in their seminary papers while they are not really able to perform groupwork at the college. Meanwhile we are trying to strengthen their individual performance and their to improve their self-presentation, while we are at the same-time neglecting their co-operative skills. Many of these students will be fit for an assessment center immediately after having got their diplomas. But perhaps they will never be able to work regularly in mixed teams and project groups with a high need for co-ordniation and co-operation, because they didn't learn this anywhere. Maybe they will become effective managers of their owns, but they wouldn't perhaps become successful in avoiding dysfunctional interpersonal competition within their workgroups or firms, and even less successful in integrating big organisations. My impression is that our training institutions are creating a new social typus which is predetermined for self-employment. I do not think romantically of the traditional types of work, but we must be aware that our educational and training institutions are even increasing the conflict between economic competition and integration of the society which will be the main contradiction of the 21st century.

The performance of our institutions and organisations will depend on balancing this conflict successfully. We see this conflict emerging e.g. in telework projects when some employees want to become teleworkers just because they don't like to be mobbed any longer while others are no longer interested to participate in the traditional working culture or in the particular culture of their firm. According to a study we made in 1994, the motivation for telework is often a negative one. Many employees don't want to maintain the social cohesion within their enterprises, and even don't want to belong to a stable working group any longer. They look at telework as a chance to become more autonomous and self-employed. But identity and social cohesion of the big companies may suffer from this as well as the ability to communication and co-operation among workers. Maybe new types of self-organisation emerge from new types of work, but this will be difficult as long as basic institutions of the society do not develop them systematically. At the moment, the institutions from schools to unions and employers' associations do not sufficiently support the new autonomy of the working subject who is often left alone with his or her problems and confrontated with new types of work organisations without being prepared for them.

Telework

We also know from research on telework and on the Internet that is a wide gap between our institutions of juridical and social regulation, education, training, and technoloy assessment on one hand, and that what we call the enculturation process of new technologies (in German: die kulturelle Aneignung der Technik). This simply means the process of social adaption and acceptance of new technologies, and the forms of making use of them. In the past, even the official institutions of technology assessment, for example the German Parliamentary Commissions („Enquete-Kommissionen") were not able to forecast the way in which people - professionals or not - would make use of the new technologies, and neither the speed of their spreading. The importance of the spontaneous development of new ways of making use of information and communication technologies has always been neglected. The institutions of technology assessment underestimated the speed and the power of the information technology push and ist decentralising impact, and overestimated the possibilities of regulating them by traditional set of juridical and social regulation instruments. To give only one example: 10 years ago some of the German unions still asked for the abolishment of telework by law.
But the wrong assessment of user needs and requirements is not at all a new phenomenon: It was Edison himself who thought that the telephone would give a nice tool for opera transmissions, that means for one-way-broadcasting by cable. This came only true 100 years later when Mr. Negroponte rediscovered this principle. Edison thought also the phonograph would give an excellent machine for managers who wanted to dictate their letters to their secretaries. We can look back on a chain of wrong assessments of the impact of new technologies on on the possibilities of regulating them. We rather have to observe people what they really do or ask them what they rather would like to do with their information and communication tools instead of defining standards and regulations before. So we have to look closer at the real user needs and requirements.

Let me come back to the problem of the institutional gap. It seems that it is even increasing as far as education and the vocational training are concerned. Professors for informatics got their technical education 25 years ago, sitting all their lifes long on their chairs loosing contact to the technical development and to the economy as well, while the life-cycle of training within the companies has become shorter and shorter. Young people adapt to new technologies within hours and without any formal training, without any support of school teachers, and without regulations on the right use of display units and on working times. They are learning informally and autodidactically. They are developing new grassroot standards. They are surfing on the Internet every night at „unsocial hours" because it is cheaper. Even kids don't need any help at all while hacking on the Internet.

These examples show us that the enculturation process develops on the base of more user autonomy and self-learning, and that it is highly individualized. Please have in your mind that the enculturation process which has led to the ability of reading and writing, that means of properly using written information, has taken far more than 500 years in Europe and is not at its end, in spite of the acitivites of many mighty institutions that have contributed to this process like churches, schools, universities, governmental authorities, etc.

Today, the new information and communication technologies do not so much suffer from a lack of acceptance from the younger generation but rather from insufficient institutionalisation compared with other technologies like book-printing, railways, electricity, etc. In nearly every sector of the society we can state an institutional gap with reagrd to the communication technologies, but cannot expect that the old institutions will fill it. Their necessity is no longer accepted by many people who have already grown up in the information society. The institutions have partly lost their functions in the process of enculturation and use of new technologies.

This will become appearent in the case of telework. Traditional laws do not protect teleworkers any longer. Traditional types of negotiations and agreements do not cover their particular problems. They are no longer integrated in the traditional culture of the organisation, and their elected representatives are far off from the workplace. Teleworkers get little training and no psychological support. Standards on data protection and ergonomical standards can hardly be controlled in their living rooms. However, life and work is amalgamating continuously in the case of teleworking. The house will no longer be a holy realm of freedom and a location of relaxation, but a very profane place where one happens to be in the most times. the consequences for society as a whole are unknown.

So we have to consider that for the first time in history, the process of institutionalisation of new technologies in society seems to be slower than the enculturation process which means that the actual development of practical knowledge and of acceptance of these technologies in every sphere of life can hardly be controlled by a set of rules created by well-accepted institutions. It's the same problem as with credit-cards. We all need them e.g. for paying on the Internet, but we have no security and no public regulation while making use of them. We have to trust into the credit card companies. But what could be the future role of institutions in working life? Why do we still need them? I think we need them because no stable culture of the information society would emerge from the ongoing enculturation process. As we define enculturation as the add-up of emerging self-evidences to the society and to its members (or to say it easier: as the process of generating new rules and forms of communications for every day life), it seems to me that the actual enculturation process of the information society as it becomes evident by the rapid spread of telework, or in a new style of communicative behavior on the Internet, is producing something that rather comes close to a non-culture or at least to many subcultures, in the sense that the emerging rules of communication are unstable, not secure, very particular, sometimes hidden, virtual, or even non-existing. The culture of the information society is lacking institutional guaranties. Marx would have said: a new type of means of production has not yet found its framework of production relations, they are in conflict with each other, and I would add: a new type of means of communications has not found ist institutional framework.

While our economic organisations and our every day life culture are adapting well and quickly to the new technologies, the institutions of working life do not because they are an element of stability for important groups in the society which are afraid by the speed of change. Although most people search for more flexibility as well, they feel uneasy with the actual situation in which the predictability of the society and the social, organisational, and legal security is lacking. Many people do not hesitate to incorporate new technologies in their private lifes. However they are looking for institutional guaranties in the working life whenever new forms of work organisation are introduced. If such guaranties are lacking, this will be an obstacle to the introduction of new flexbile types of work organisation. But if they are given by the traditional institutions, this may be the case either. Why that?

The European institutions of working life are based on a hundred years old standards like



This type of regulation has come to conflict with the demands of a new type of flexible firm as well as with the new grassroot culture of information society. Between the Scylla of the market trends and the Charybdis of rapid cultural change, our ancient institutions have come into a most uncomfortable situation. While they are looked at critically by the type of entrepreneur who wants to increase the flexibility and competitiveness of his organisation, they are at the same time no longer attractive for younger people who have been already socialised in the information society, believing that they wouldn't get any more security by them. But they neither give the right feeling of security to the elder generation.

So we urgently need a debate on the institutional framework of the information society. This framework should consist of more explicite rules and could contribute to stabilize new types of work without suppressing the new trend towards more autonomy and self-organisation of the users. But how do we come to this new framework? Not only it seems more and more difficult to find generally accorded rules e.g. on flexible working time patterns or on the distribution and remuneration of tasks in working groups. Moreover we have to accept (what is seriously concerning trade unions as well as employers' associations) that the belief in collective mechanisms of regulation is no longer shared by the majority of people or even by the majority of employees. In their eyes, the institutions of working life have suffered from a considerable loss of legitimation during the last decade.

To become trustworthy as well as effective, the new institutions of the information society can neither be administered in a way top-down by bureaucracies supported by scientific commissions, nor should they be negotiated and shaped under the dominating influence of the existing institutions. As we have heard before, the traditional principles of work as much as the frontiers between working life and private life and between the sectors of the society are put into question by the development of the communication technologies. We have to accept the increasing autonomy and capacity of self-organisation of the individuals. We also see the arrival of new societal groups while the traditional actors will certainly have to accept a certain loss of their decision power on the new issues discussed here. But we have also to be careful: The new institutions will not emerge spontaneously from the new user culture of information technology and from the activities of Internet kids.

From my personal point of view, it would be a mistake to believe that the process of moving and shaking the traditional institutions has yet finished. It's still going on under the aspects of deregulation, liberalisation, globalisation, and flexibilisation. But we cannot wait building the new institutions of the information society, of learning and training, work protection and bargaining until the process of moving and shaking will have come to an end. We have to start filling the gap just now. considering that many institutions will be only transitory. Building them will be a prosaic and never-ending process as long as the process of technological change is going on as rapid as now.

The Green paper is not very concrete on the question how the new institutions will look like. But it clearly states the importance of user requirements and participation, moderation and discourse, expertise and broad consent. According to my opinions, it still underestimates the possibility of disruptures in this process as well as the destructive potential of some elements of the culture of the information society and the destroying impact on many traditional institutions.
But I have to come back from a global point of view to a more concrete and prosaic perspective, trying to show how the institutional gap of the information society could be filled by developing concrete models of regulation. As an example, I take telework as the type of work which is requiring new institutional guaranties most urgently. Together with my colleague Gaby Spaeker, I wrote a short article on that aspect in the september issue of the German journal „Mitbestimmung". Our experience is based on a project of DG XIII with the acronyme MIRTI - Models of industrial relations in telework innovation. This project is co-ordinated by our Italian friend Renato Rizzo from the IESS-AE in Rome.

Models of Industrial Relations in Telework Innovation The basic idea of the project is that the demand for regulation cannot be deducted from a consistent scientific analysis. So we have to look for the emergence of new types of user needs and requirements as well as for new de facto types of regulations.

In a first step, economic, social, psychological, ecological etc. needs and requirements are observed by the analysis of existing projects and from former research. In a second step, we will collect existing laws, collective regulations, and types of contracts on telework negotiated for a firm, an industrial sector, and administration, or by cross-sectoral agreements in order to documentate and compare them against the national and sectoral backgrounds. We will continuously oberserve the negotiation processes and the emergence of new types of contracts at several test sites. The results of our analysis will be discussed with user groups and experts. Then we will disseminate those standards which are highly accepted on an international level by World Wide Web and other media, thus supporting the international discussion as well as the development of individual orientations (e.g. by giving precise definitions of the types of telework) on all those issues that should be regulated urgently while introducing this type of work. We will also ask for the chances and risks of transfering standards from one country to another,forming cross-national evaluation teams. Some of the solutions found by our group will be installed in selected test sites and evaluated systematically.

After this, we hope that we will be able to offer concepts for legislation, collective negotiation, and individual contracts as well as for new forms of local self-organisation of teleworkers. The public discourse on these questions and the support by the comission could lead to what I would call a pre-institutionalisation of social standards which are highly flexible and compatible with various types of telework. The whole project looks like new the new type of process-orientated technical standardisation which we find in many projects of DG XIII, but of course has much more involvement of non-professional actors. If finally the emerging standards are broadly accepted, we will have closed a little bit of the big institutional gap of the information society.