Conclusions from case studies and survey

The case studies, reported in Chapters 4 to 10, were followed by a survey of a 165 companies in the seven participating countries. The purpose of the survey was to investigate whether findings from the case studies could be considered representative for a larger number of learning-oriented organisations throughout Europe. Since the survey results tended to corroborate the case study outcomes, in this chapter, the main conclusions from both are discussed jointly. The chapter provides a general account of the results, focusing on ‘content’ outcomes, rather than on numerical results. Readers interested in the specifics of the case and survey results, are referred to the original project reports (Tjepkema, et al., 1999; Tjepkema et al., 2000).

The study set out to answer three main research questions:
1 How do HRD departments in learning-oriented organisations throughout Europe envision their own role in stimulating and supporting employees to learn continuously as a part of everyday work (with the intention of contributing to organisational learning, and thus enhancing organisational competitiveness)?
2 What strategies do European HRD departments adopt to realise their envisioned
role?
3 What factors inhibit the realisation of this new role? How do HRD practitioners
cope with these factors?
4 What factors facilitate the realisation of HRD’s new role?

The main results from the case studies and the survey are provided for each of these questions. First, it is important to point out that from these data, it is not possible to make judgements concerning the situation in any specific country, because the project only incorporated some ‘good examples’ of learning-oriented organisations from each participating EU nation. The researchers did not select a representative group of companies, since this is not possible in either case studies, or small-scale survey research. It is impossible to make a judgement on the situation in a specific country based on only a few cases, but the data were checked for national differences nonetheless. In general no significant differences were found between the situation in the seven participating countries.