BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

The authors of the national chapters in this book say very little about the role of the labor forces that big businesses have employed to create national wealth. Our contribution seeks to fill this gap by focusing on investment in the skills of millions of individuals within the managerial organizations and production processes of the dominant enterprises of the most competitive economies – those of the United States, Germany, and Japan.

How have these massive investments in skill formation been accomplished? The most successful industrial economies have relied heavily on private-sector business enterprises to plan the strategy and implement the structure that results in skill formation. Yet corporate decisions to invest in human assets almost invariably reflect the educational foundations on which enterprise training must build as well as social norms concerning the social groups, based on gender, race, and class, who are likely to be most receptive to corporate training and identify most closely with corporate goals. A system of skill formation and the organizational learning it makes possible are collective processes, and are influenced by the particular social environment in which they occur. These social influences, which typically take on a national character, are most evident in the willingness of major corporations to invest in the skills of shop-floor labor and to integrate these skills into the organizational structure of the enterprise as a whole, as well as in the evolving social relations between managers and workers.