Employee-Driven Innovation Amongst ‘Routine’ Employees in the UK: The Role of Organizational ‘Strategies’ and Individual ‘Tactics’

Governments worldwide seek to upgrade the ‘basic skills’ of employees deemed to have low literacy and numeracy, in order to enable their greater productivity and participation in workplace practices. A longitudinal investigation of such interventions in the United Kingdom has examined the effects on employees and on organizations of engaging in basic skills programmes offered in and through the workplace. Through the ‘tracking’ of employees in selected organizational contexts, Evans and Waite (2010) have highlighted ways in which the interplay between formal and informal workplace learning can help to create the environments for employees in lower-grade jobs to use and expand their skills. This workplace learning is a precondition, a stimulus and an essential ingredient for participation in employee-driven innovation, as workers engage with others to vary, and eventually to change, work practices.

[1]  B. Langer,et al.  The Practice of Everyday Life , 2019, Forms of Thinking in Leopardi’s Zibaldone.

[2]  C. Lloyd,et al.  Low-Wage Work in the United Kingdom , 2008 .

[3]  J. Bessant.  High-Involvement Innovation: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Change , 2003 .

[4]  Richard Whitley,et al.  Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems , 1999 .

[5]  P. Rogers.  Skills for Life: Statement on the National Strategy for Improving Adult Literacy and Numeracy Skills. The Agency Responds. , 2001 .

[6]  Alison Fuller,et al.  Expansive learning environments: integrating organisational and personal development , 2004 .

[7]  Ewart Keep,et al.  The Assessment: Knowledge, Skills, and Competitiveness , 1999 .

[8]  Gert Biesta,et al.  Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective , 2007 .

[9]  Ying Zhou,et al.  Skills at work, 1986 to 2006 , 2007 .

[10]  Understanding Collaborative Teaching and Learning in Adult Literacy: Practices in Canada and the United Kingdom , 2011 .

[11]  Edmund Waite,et al.  Stimulating the innovation potential of ‘routine’ workers through workplace learning , 2010 .

[12]  Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower,et al.  An Ecology Metaphor for Educational Policy Analysis: A Call to Complexity , 2008 .

[13]  Lorna Unwin,et al.  Improving Workplace Learning , 2006 .

[14]  U. Bronfenbrenner.  The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and , 1979 .

[15]  K. Evans,et al.  Improving Literacy at Work , 2010 .

[16]  S. Ball.  Big Policies/Small World: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy , 1998 .

[17]  Alison Fuller,et al.  Workplace learning in context , 2004 .