In the modern vision of the social dialogue, the experiences of new forms and tools in this field are increasing day by day, especially in the form of “social networks” and blog’s people, as the example of the “avatars” solidarity between IBM workers in different continents.
Benchmarking is the most important tool to implement a strategy for improvement. However, we have some considerations to do on this subject and draw the attention of the experts to the limitations of the benchmarking programmes.
We could summarize these limitations to the following aspects:
- Relativity
- Transferability
- Reversibility
The relativity is implied in the concept of benchmarking, that is a “methodology” to join the best.
The best in absolute does not yet exist: all the partners involved in this programme are asked to continue their creative work and to “shape” their activities according to their own reality, institutional and social conditions, the different stage where they are, looking for the “harmonization” in the diversity: the social dialogue is a result of a “process”(generally slow and gradual).
“Transferability”: it is easier to transfer processes concerning the production of the industry than the processes of the policies, because of the elements of the culture, institutional setting, creativity or other skills which cannot be reproduced out of their milieu or social capital. Every nation (even every “man”) has its own pace in its own historic processes. The exchanges on the social dialogue forms should be a co-operative path more than a competition about the “best-in-class”.
As far as the “reversibility” is concerned, we can have a society, that can show excellent practices of the social dialogue now, but not after a certain period. The exchange of experiences and the continual co-operative programmes like the present one, could ensure and stimulate a work-in-progress in the way of the social dialogue.
Networks are the essential means of linking one group of actors to others whom they affect. Beyond simple networks, partnerships require the commitment of the agents to work fully together to address problems and opportunities. This means they must accept long term structures that work toward sustained commitment to change and the achievement of quality. They must also accept an active commitment to changing the internal operations of each actor and helping other actors to change to achieve an improved system overall. Hence networking alone is the basic framework of the strategy, whereas partnerships require active participation. |
