Organisational participation as a way of encouraging worker involvement in decision making has long been a topic of interest to theorists concerned with enhancing the attitudes of employees and their performance in the workplace. It has been associated with topics such as motivation, human relations theory and leadership. Thus organisational participation has been situated squarely in managerialist agendas, which are primarily concerned with outcomes such as productivity and the means for its achievement. The concept therefore shares similar intentions with neo‐human relations strategies such as TQM and employee “empowerment”. It also shares their deep‐seated malaise – the paradox that employees are offered power, but the very process of its being offered by those more powerful renders it totally conditional and ultimately of little substance. The fragility of its operation is increased by middle or lower levels of management who are given the responsibility to implement participation strategies which they see as compromising their own power.
The book highlights these problems and their consequences for the general lack of the success of participation schemes in organisations. Its wide‐ranging discussion demonstrates the complexity and breadth of the area. The subject is tackled from the point of view of different disciplines – psychology, organisation theory and employee relations, and many definitions and forms of implementation are discussed. Various types of organisations are examined in a number of countries – in both public and private sectors, including employee‐owned cooperatives such as kibbutzim in Israel and Mondragon in Spain.
The hoary, but for many critical, issue of the social, political and economic context is discussed in the book. The contradictory nature of participation in a capitalist world unequal in its distribution of power and rewards is acknowledged early on. Attempts to implement participation are generally made in hierarchically differentiated organisations with an unequal division of labour, not naturally conducive to the egalitarian ethos associated with participation. The authors argue that participation schemes were more easily implemented in Tito’s Yugoslavia and present‐day Slovenia than in many capitalist societies, despite issues of inequality there, too. This contradiction dogs the project throughout, as the authors show time and again how issues of power make managers resistant to allowing meaningful participation and workers suspicious of attempts to do so.
The authors are clearly sympathetic to the concept of increased employee participation in organisations, but from the start they acknowledge that their treatment of participation is situated within the parameters of a managerially‐directed strategy. This aims to achieve standard management goals of increased productivity and competitiveness, or lower absenteeism and labour turnover. Participation is, in other words, seen as a management tool and is often described as something “used” when the need arose – in situations of uncertainty, for example. They also recognise the faddishness of the concept and in many places show it as being no more than a repackaged managerial strategy.
The location of participation within managerialist parameters leads to problems with the concept and terminology of this subject. For how can one believe in a participation which can be imposed on employees, measured out, increased at times of uncertainty and withdrawn at management’s discretion? It smacks of those imposed “empowerment” policies which have been judged to have more to do with managerial control than giving staff additional authority.
In their extensive analysis of schemes for participation by lower level employees, most of the instances reveal weaknesses in the implementation of participation. At best, limitations on meaningful participation by workers occurred, at worst there were failures. The initiatives often came from senior management, relationships were unequal, and the schemes were often regarded as an instrumental ploy by management, exacerbating low levels of trust. Trade unions also did not always support participation schemes. The belief that workers lacked technical knowledge or expertise was often used by management to oppose such schemes. The lack of success of such initiatives was underlined by research showing that workers were generally content to limit their aspirations for a share in the decision making in their organisation roughly to the level of responsibility they already had.
Failure has often been laid at the door of the employees, and doubts have been raised about workers having the necessary “competence” to engage effectively in participation. One can, of course, also raise this question about managers – do they have the necessary skills and will to make participation work, and can they withstand the temptations of hanging on to as much power as they can? The authors in fact do not rest with the conclusion that the problems with participation are primarily an effect of worker uninterest and limited aspirations. They also show how management has resisted participation projects. At various levels below the most senior, from whom the initiative for participation often arose, managers often felt threatened by the prospect of increased worker power and, at higher levels, participation projects could founder through the replacement of the chief executive, as happened at Shell.
Heller et al. have undertaken a mammoth task and demonstrated careful scholarship covering a vast area. They have worked at an organisational meta‐level and have largely based their analyses on company policy and the generalised experiences of senior management. In raising significant caveats in the way participation schemes were often conceived and implemented, they have opened up the field for more work in this area. The significance of relational factors influencing the outcomes of organisational participation has been recognised by the authors. They acknowledge that internal processes can override formal strategies, and point to the need for a joint learning climate where a feeling of participation can be created if management is prepared to share confidential information. They have also stated that participation is likely to work more successfully if introduced as part of a package along with training, trade union involvement and a symbolic reduction of status differences. By the same token, participation can be obstructed by withholding information or by mystification.
Organisational processes are key, and one way forward is to investigate more deeply what has actually happened on the ground with participation experiments – how these are understood, experienced and interpreted by participants at all levels – and to allow voices, hitherto largely silent, to speak. We need to see what choices both workers and managers have made, and what choices they perceive themselves as having, with regard to schemes offering participation.
The notion that employees do not wish to have influence or control is contestable. Heller et al. recognise that any dependency through lack of skill or experience can be countered by buying‐in expertise, and the question needs to be asked as to why the use of consultants, so popular in other sectors, has not been adopted as a strategy by workers, particularly in large companies. Labour process theorists have long shown how employees wish to have maximum control over their work situations and in sometimes difficult circumstances have gone to some lengths and used ingenious means to achieve what power they could (see, for example, Noon and Blyton, 1997). Why this does not seem to have extended to participation schemes needs to be explored.
The impression that participation is essentially doomed to fail because workers are not interested or not qualified to make it work is potentially misleading and also politically dangerous. More detailed research on organisational processes, as suggested above, could further unravel how participation experiments have worked in practice and what sense has been made of them by the different stakeholders in a context of societal and global inequalities which are ever increasing. This book has paved the way for a new set of questions to be asked at a more operational level, which could elucidate some of the complexities in participation schemes, lead to more informed practice and challenge ideas about the larger structural imperatives that currently prevail.
