Project presentation
Meadow’s objectives
The main goal of the Meadow project is to establish a set of Guidelines for collecting and interpreting harmonised data on organisational change and work restructuring and their economic and social impacts at the EU level. These Guidelines will constitute a first step towards implementing a harmonised European survey instrument and will serve to promote comparative research through the development and diffusion of tools, methodologies and research designs for the development of large-scale data sets of wide applicability for comparative research and across disciplines.
This overall goal will be realised through a series of interrelated tasks and objectives, starting with integrating the existing knowledge on organisational change and work restructuring and moving progressively towards the identification of a core set of indicators developed into survey questions that will be tested. User and stakeholder involvement and monitoring will assure the widest possible dissemination and exploitation of the project results.
Objective 1 : Integrating existing knowledge on the dynamics of organisation and work
The objective will be achieved through an overview of research traditions, a synthesis of theoretical and empirical research findings, and an analysis of the consequences of the main theories of organisational change on measurement strategies.
Objective 2 : Mapping and assessing existing quantitative data sources of the National and European Statistical System at the employer level and at the employee level
This objective will involve bringing together information about the survey instruments on organisational change in Europe and about major experiences in non EU countries. Meetings and discussion with the designers of these survey instruments will provide information about survey strategies and methodologies, and about different possible uses of the surveys’ core results.
Objective 3 : explaining the complementarities between the measures proposed in the Meadow Guidelines and those measures existing in OECD/Eurostat survey manuals
In order to achieve this aim the project will examine: complementarities between the notion of organisational innovation being developed in the current revisions of the Oslo Manual and the notion of organisational change developed in the Guidelines; complementarities between the EUROSTAT methodological manual on ICT and measures of ICT use proposed in the Guidelines; and complementarities between the Canberra Manual on human resources for science and technology and HRM measures proposed in the Guidelines.
Objective 4 : Finding an agreement on ‘best practices’ for European survey instruments on organisational change and its economic and social impacts
This will involve identifying and discussing priorities in measurement of organisational changes and its impacts with users and key stakeholders, and defining a core set of indicators to be operationalised into questions.
Objective 5 : testing the Meadow Guidelines
The testing phase of the project will involve designing an employer and an employee questionnaire operationalising the core set of indicators into survey questions. The questionnaire will be translated into the languages of a subset of the European countries present in the consortium and will be tested on a moderate scale.
Objective 6 : the exploitation and dissemination of the Meadow Guidelines
Interaction at key milestones with users, stakeholders and national and European data collection institutions will be used to further this goal. The project will notably involve users and stakeholders in the implementation of the project through the organisation of meetings involving policymakers, representatives from the network comprising the European Statistical System (ESS), as well as representatives from employer and labour organisations.