Productivity and New Work Organization. An assessment of the literature

The paper presents a literature review on the characteristics of new forms of work organization, with respect to traditional Taylor-Fordist organization, and their impact on productivity. The analysis is developed primarily with reference to the world of manufacturing firms, focusing particularly on the roles established by new organizational design, new work practices, new technologies (ICT), industrial relations and their complementarities. The new organizational configuration that effectively emerges from the literature is characterized by a set of innovative bundles of work practices made up not only of different ‘ingredients’ but also of the different weights of each ingredient. Hence, the employer and/or manager has two levers to pursue efficiency and performance: ingredients and their indefinable combination. The superior performance of this new work organization ? in line with lean production paradigm (sometime called World Class Manufacturing - WCM) – is clearly acclaimed by a number of econometric studies despite the fact that some methodological questions remain open, which unless resolved will not aid in overcoming theresistance of sceptics, be they academics, practitioners, managers, trade union leaders or policy makers.