Merging Worklife Organizational Innovation and Educational Programs: Promoting Continuous Adaptations to the Global Economy

This essay honors the accomplishments of Morten Levin both by analyzing some of the key innovative educational programs he created and by extending the elements of that analysis to two other cases, that of Aker Solutions and the Mondragon Cooperatives. We acknowledge that the relationship between higher education institutions and manufacturing-service-public sector organizations is multiplex and has undergone multiple transformations over the decades. It is also affected by the national political economy and the scope and diversity of the higher education sector itself. Creating sustained and yet dynamic relations among these actors in service of both higher education and the efficacy and innovativeness of worklife organizations is a significant challenge which all the cases we present have addressed with some success. What the efforts have in common is a democratizing action research built on an ethos and worldview of the benefits of collaboration and co-creation, and organizational capabilities built on Actor Network strategies to promote collaboration and innovation as a way of adapting to the rapidly changing world conditions effectively. We argue that there are many more such examples in existence and that a key role for action research is to document them, show how more collaborative and adaptive organizational processes are possible and show how neoliberal New Public Management is an authoritarian “wrong turn” with dire consequences. Ultimately, this essay is an argument against the “iron cage” view of bureaucracy as always coercive and stultifying and show that it is not bureaucracy but the authoritarian approaches to creating coercive bureaucracies that destroy organizational collaborations and innovation.