LIBRI DI FEDERICO BUTERA

In occasione dei quarant’anni di attività accademica di Gianfranco Dioguardi, allievi e amici hanno desiderato onorare questa straordinaria avventura intellettuale attraverso vari contributi che riguardano l’idea di azione imprenditoriale nelle sue più differenti forme e manifestazioni. Si ricompone così in queste pagine la complessità dell’azione imprenditoriale quale comportamento dell’individuo proteso tra una tensione culturale e una necessità organizzativa.

I risultati di un’indagine sul cambiamento delle Pubbliche Amministrazioni, condotta su incarico del Dipartimento della Funzione Pubblica. L’indagine analizza programmi nazionali di cambiamento delle PA (Usa, Gran Bretagna e Francia), svolge un’analisi critica delle iniziative promosse negli anni scorsi dal Dipartimento per la Funzione Pubblica ed effettua la ricostruzione di due casi italiani di gestione del cambiamento (Agenzia delle Entrate e Dipartimento delle Politiche di Sviluppo).

Sezione progetti e politiche organizzative Analisi e progettazione del lavoro della conoscenza: il modello della Fondazione Irso e due casi - Knowledge workers numbers are growing in all western countries, from 39 to 52% of working population as international statistics reveal. But in many cases their work is not well understood, the nature of their work resembles more to a character than to a well defined job, it is difficult to evaluate their performance, critical is the balance between their need for job security and their boundaryless careers, their professions are often strategical but rarely enter in a clear system of professions as in the past the medical doctors, the architects, the lawyers. A proven methodology for analysis and design of roles, professions and personal growth is presented and illustrated through two cases: the top level experts (or knowledge owners) in a high tech large corporation and the case of immigrant social workers in charge of helping immigrant people to integrate in schools, workplace, neighbourhood. Aims of such a methodology are: unrevealing the nature of knowledge work, understanding the character defined by the organization end performed by people, identify and measuring the performances, give people flexsecurity, develop e strengthen critical and strategic professions.

The true motor of the present changes in work contents and identities is not technology in itself but the continuous social process of redesigning organizations and jobs. Taylor-fordism in itself was not a consequence of technology but rather a major business innovation, that is an architectural platform for specific technological, organizational and social change. A new paradigm of socio-technical architecture takes decades to apply. This is why we do not know whether any post-fordism may be yet among us or is just going to come. The first point of the paper is that ICT do not convert real into virtual organizations and jobs but merely design and manage them on a remote basis, generating an unprecedented change in the TTT setting of the organizations (tecnology, time and territory). This foster global and local ommunication, cooperation, knowledge management and new forms of communities. The second point is this development of ICT process accelerates a trend begun in the 70s from mechanical toward organic organizations, from hierarchical castles toward network organizations, from standardized to individualized form of organizations, from narrow jobs toward knowledge based professions, and many others. The managerial rhetoric of the last 20 years misinterpreted those paradigmatic changes and wrongly announced the death of the organizations and the rise of confused notions as people, human side of enterprise, intangibles and the others. This paper is an open confrontation of current human resources theories, seemingly late ri-editions of Human Relations approaches of the 50ies.

Birth and decline of the global village myth The paper examines some crucial aspects about Internet developing, focussing in particular on the reappearing risks of technological determinism and of the technological devolution. Discussing the myth of the global village, the thesis ICT will not result in cancelling the organisational structures and in converting reality into a virtual reality, rather in a growing capacities of treating the processes at distance, in a context of new balance between the global and the local is strongly stressed.