You can find my patent and some of my citations on Google Scholar.
Years ago I also discovered a student at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) in IE431 ERGONOMICS IN ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF JOBS referenced my work in a presentation named "Empowerment" (file no longer available).
As a part of my on-going research and the conclusion of my Ph.D. program, I presented my research in various forums and forms. I presented a paper at The First Annual Southern California Inter-Disciplinary Graduate Student Conference at USC on April 4, 1998: New Frontiers in Research: Communication, Technology, and Society. I also made an abbreviated presentation on work-in-progress at the Ford Foundation Fellows conference in October, 1998.
You can read/download my first published and refereed piece in issue #1 of the Journal of Systemic Knowledge Management titled "A Conceptual Framework for Modeling the Conflict Between Product Creation and Knowledge Development Amongst Production Workers." The article can now be found at The Journal of Knowledge Management Practice . It was also listed in the Business Publications Search Engine.
I had the honor of acceptance in another journal. The article is titled "Empowerment and Production Workers: A Knowledge-Based Perspective." It appeared in the Participation and Empowerment, an International Journal Vol. 6, No. 7 (1998). This article received honors as best paper of the year for the journal! You can find the abstract below. Please note that the journal was discontinued with many of its themes rolled into the publisher's Organizational Development journal.
by N. Duru Ahanotu (November, 1998)
This paper emphasizes that production workers achieve empowerment through participation in processes of innovation and through a collaborative partnership with the sources of design knowledge in a company (including engineers and managers). An alternative reading of Taylor's principles of scientific management suggests that empowerment ultimately depends upon the distribution and use of knowledge. By including promising theory from the literature and a few examples from industry and field study, the author concludes that to create effective opportunities for empowerment on the factory floor, knowledge development for production workers must move beyond the confines of routine continuous improvement and beyond efficiency-based logic and reach into the realms of innovation that define the very paradigms of production.
Keywords: empowerment, production workers, innovation, knowledge development, manufacturing.
Here is a copy of my dissertation's abstract... It is published and available through UMI.
The identification of continuous improvement and innovation as separate, but linked, models of progress in manufacturing has led to new understandings of change in manufacturing industries. So far, this theory has not significantly accommodated new roles for production workers nor has it generated new analytical models for understanding knowledge development for production workers in innovative organizations. We establish an integrated, knowledge-based theory of production work to explain how to balance this goal of expanded knowledge development with the conventional, profit-seeking goal of product fabrication. The objective is to develop a model for effectively allocating production work across a portfolio of operations and other knowledge-creating tasks --- a model that improves organizational performance, aligns production with the overall innovative potential of manufacturing, and promotes the empowerment of production workers.
We use organizational theory and empirical investigation to explain the propensity to innovate across a variety of production workers. Four distinct types, or cohorts, of innovators are identified and shown to provide strong predictors of the potential for knowledge development. These cohorts require differentiated task portfolios spanning traditional operations tasks, original experimentation, and collaboration with agents who are the primary sources of design knowledge. This bi-directional actualization of innovation constitutes a knowledge-based perspective on the participation of production workers in organizational processes.
The theoretical framework supports two dynamic, analytic, simulation models of knowledge development in manufacturing. The first model examines a linear trajectory of multiple process changes over one product life-cycle. The second model expands this treatment over multiple product cycles. Both models treat knowledge accumulation as adaptation controlled by the variability in the production process and its complexity. Production costs and the rate of production are in turn directly proportional to the rate of this knowledge accumulation. Existing capabilities and technology constrain the potential for continuous improvement of these metrics. The synchronous and asymptotic growth in capabilities
The synchronous and asymptotic growth in capabilities, knowledge, and technology, as simulated by the models, corresponds to the empirical findings from the field study and to the expanded theory of manufacturing innovation. The framework also suggests a possible association between process complexity, product complexity, and the number of product cycles on the rate of knowledge development. Additional research is necessary to validate these relationships and to further develop our understanding of the conditions that promote the development of production worker knowledge.