4.9 Social partnership

The significance of the lone entrepreneur as a driving force of economic development is undeniable: the individual ruggedly taking his or her idea from conception through innovation into successfully marketed goods, services or processes. Indeed, all European countries need to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship.

However, productivity development is increasingly dependent on cooperation and team-working. For advance in any working community can only be achieved by the willing involvement of all concerned, pulling together towards mutually accepted ends.

Such ‘social partnership’ has been the very basis of EANPC member organisations. For they (or their predecessors) were constituted with the direct involvement of governments, employer bodies and trade unions who see them as actors in significant areas of overlapping interests: the pursuit of socio-economic change (notably in the eight areas already discussed), deliberated in advance, and flanked by measures aimed at ensuring the continuing employability of those who are likely to suffer from the change in question.

Partnership can take many forms ranging from working agreements at the national and regional levels (with various pacts having been worked out by the ‘social partners’) down to the enterprise, plant and work-groups levels, with the growing importance of ‘value chains’. What the co-operative (rather than confrontational) processes might lose in rapidity of decision-taking they gain through the committed backing and understanding of all parties. Partnership helps to build social capital on all levels in the enterprise. We have seen that social capital together with human capital constitute the human factor, essential to productivity improvement. Studies (LINK 3) show that there is a significant correlation between an enterprise’s willingness and experience with partnership with its own workers and its success in developing key partnerships in alliances, joint ventures and partnerships in its value chain.

And the whole demonstrates the continuity of the original ‘productivity movement’ of the European Productivity Agency which defined productivity as a state of mind, knowing that what you do today is an improvement on yesterday, and striving to make tomorrow better still.