- Employee participation and involvement has become of
interest to managers concerned with employee motivation and organizational commitment
- Contributions from leading international IR and HRM
scholars
- Reviews changing contexts, different
cultural/institutional models, old/'new' economy models, and changing social and political
patterns
- Includes tools and cases that can be applied to HRM
Employee participation encompasses the range of mechanisms used to involve the
workforce in decisions at all levels of the organization - whether direct or indirect -
conducted with employees or through their representatives. In its various guises, the
topic of employee participation has been a recurring theme in industrial relations and
human resource management. One of the problems in trying to develop any analysis of
participation is that there is potentially limited overlap between these different
disciplinary traditions, and scholars from diverse traditions may know relatively little
of the research that has been done elsewhere. Accordingly in this book, a number of the
more significant disciplinary areas are analysed in greater depth in order to ensure that
readers gain a better appreciation of what participation means from these quite different
contextual perspectives.
Not only is there a range of different traditions contributing to the research and
literature on the subject, there is also an extremely diverse sets of practices that
congregate under the banner of participation. The handbook discusses various arguments and
schools of thought about employee participation, analyzes the range of forms that
participation can take in practice, and examines the way in which it meets objectives that
are set for it, either by employers, trade unions, individual workers, or, indeed, the
state.
In doing so, the Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world
who present and discuss fundamental theories and approaches to participation in
organization as well as their connection to broader political forces. These selections
address the changing contexts of employee participation, different cultural/ institutional
models, old/'new' economy models, shifting social and political patterns, and the
correspondence between industrial and political democracy and participation.
Table of Contents
Part I: Introduction
1: Adrian Wilkinson, Paul J. Gollan, Mick Marchington, and David Lewin: Conceptualizing
Employee Participation in Organizations
Part II: Perspectives
2: Peter Boxall and John Purcell: An HRM Perspective on Employee Participation
3: Peter Ackers: An Industrial Relations Perspective on Employee Participation
4: Glenn Patmore: A Legal Perspective on Employee Participation
5: Miguel Martinez Lucio: Labour Process and Marxist Perspectives on Employee
Participation
6: David Marsden and Almudena Canibano: An Economic Perspective on Employee Participation
Part III: Forms of Participation in Practice
7: Adrian Wilkinson and Tony Dundon: Direct Employee Participation
8: Richard Block and Peter Berg: Collective Bargaining as a Form of Employee
Participation: Observations on the United States and Europe
9: Paul J. Gollan: Employer Strategies Towards Non-Union Collective Voice
10: Raymond Markey, Nicola Balnave, and Greg Patmore: Worker Directors and Work
Ownership/Cooperatives
11: Bruce E. Kaufman and Daphne G. Taras: Employee Participation Through Non-Union Forms
of Employee Representation
12: Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick and Richard Hyman: Works Councils: The European Model of
Industrial Democracy?
13: Eric Kaarsemaker, Andrew Pendleton, and Erik Poutsma: Employee Share Ownership
14: Ian Kessler: Financial Participation
Part IV: Processes and Outcomes
15: Gregor Gall: Labour Union Responses to Participation in Employing Organisations
16: Rafael Gomez, Alex Bryson, and Paul Willman: Voice in the Wilderness? The Shift from
Union to Non-Union Voice in Britain
17: Stephen Wood: High Involvement Management and Performance
18: David Lewin: Employee Voice and Mutual Gains
Part V: Policy and Comparative Issues
19: Mick Marchington and Andrew R. Timming: Participation Across Organizational Boundaries
20: John W. Budd and Stefan Zagelmeyer: Public Policy and Employee Participation
21: Howard Gospel and Andrew Pendleton: Corporate Governance and Employee Participation
22: Carola Frege and John Godard: Cross-National Variation in Representation Rights and
Governance at Work
23: Geoffrey Wood: Employee Participation in Developing and Emerging Countries
24: Nick Wailes and Russell D. Lansbury: International and Comparative Perspectives on
Employee Participation
25: Robyn Archer: Freedom, Democracy, and Capitalism: Ethics and Employee Participation
640 pages, Paperback
