3. Developing Workplace Innovation Policies in the European Union

Developing organisational performance and job quality simultaneously has been an issue in European countries since the introduction of ‘scientific management’ more than 100 years ago. How to prevent ‘deskilling’ and ‘intensification’? After the Second World War policies have been developed to improve both productivity and job quality by, amongst other things, stimulating management—worker cooperation. However, these endeavours had to be reinforced regularly because the market mechanism does not provide a good jobs economy by itself. From the 1990s, the European Union developed a series of policies on ‘work organisation’, later ‘workplace innovation’. The newest challenge is to complement technological innovation with workplace innovation.