PREFACE

This collection of essays draws together some of the latest research on worker participation and examines not only the enormous diversity of its meanings and forms in the contemporary period but also its global character. The essays range across West and East Europe, the United States and Japan, China, and the Third World. Each of them is informed in some way by the conviction that worker participation is an eminently political phenomenon—that it is about politics and power at the level of the workplace, and that the larger context of social, political, and economic power and organization shapes what happens to participation locally. In this sense, the volume is not simply about internal workplace reforms. Nor is it a country-by-country survey of laws and institutions, but rather a collection of substantive analyses of the actual dynamics of participation and change.

My own essay, which introduces the volume, outlines some of the issues and problems of worker participation in the late twentieth century in the advanced industrial democracies. It situates participatory reform in the context of labor process debates over the past decade and examines some recent innovations and their relation to the nature of skills, the development of technology, the process of collective bargaining and union power, health and safety regulation, and work-time flexibility. Various elements of the vision of the democratization of work, which has inspired much of participatory theory over the last century, not only continue to have relevance but in some ways have found more practical resonance in the transformations we are currently witnessing.

Robert Cole’s essay examines small-group innovations, such as quality circles and team organization, in three highly different societies, Japan, the United States, and Sweden, and argues for the need to focus on macropolitical and environmental factors in understanding their development and diffusion. Robert Howard and Leslie Schneider, Andrew Martin, and Giuseppe Della Rocca examine technological change and the various ways in which workers have begun to participate in the design and implementation of new systems. Howard and Schneider look at some of the most advanced examples of technology bargaining in Norway and compare these to cases in the United States. In his essay Martin examines a project in Sweden in which graphics workers from four Scandinavian countries developed new design specifications for computerized text and image processing that would upgrade the skills of workers and enhance their control over the work process. Della Rocca looks at the impact of the new technologies on participation and industrial relations in Italy, and sets the Italian experience against the background of similar developments in Scandinavia, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Britain. In his analysis of Germany, Christopher Allen examines the development of codetermination through different stages over the course of the century and focuses particularly on the problems of linking macroparticipation (in the works councils, etc.) with the newer concerns of work humanization, technological change, and work-time reduction. George Ross looks at another tradition with a very long history, namely, that of autogestion in France. He focuses on the revival of the autogestionnaire programs and slogans in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the movements that spawned them, and then traces the way that these were utilized in the political battles and realignments within the French left thereafter. The triumph of the left in 1981 led to a series of participatory reforms as part of the attempt to restructure the legal basis of industrial relations, but the more radical resonances of autogestion were no longer a part of that project.

The essays by Ellen Comisso, Henry Norr, and Jeanne Wilson examine the ways in which worker participation and self-management have been an essential part of the reform process in centrally planned economies. Comisso compares the self-management reforms in Yugoslavia that were able to establish a permanent political constituency for decentralized power in the economy with reforms after 1968 in Hungary. Despite the recent laws on self-management and the very innovative Enterprise Contract Work Associations within the firms, the vicissitudes of reform in Hungary have reflected the failure to establish similar kinds of political alliances within firms between workers and managers, and between managers and the ministries, which helped consolidate self-management on a decentralized basis in Yugoslavia. Henry Norr’s essay examines the development of a grassroots movement for self-management in Poland in 1981 and the way in which it became part of the general strategy of Solidarity to cope with the economic crisis and the more general crisis of power in Polish society. And Jeanne Wilson looks at how participation has become part of the larger reform process in China since 1978, serving to secure political legitimation, remove operational control of the factories from party committees, and depoliticize the factories after the disruptive struggles of the Mao era.

Finally, Evelyne Huber Stephens examines the phenomenon of worker participation in three less developed capitalist countries: in Peru, where reforming military elites attempted to use Industrial Communities to undermine the unions, and in Chile and Jamaica, where participation was part of a more general democratic socialist project. In each case, the fate of participation was linked to the larger reform efforts, and relations of economic dependency set the parameters within which reformers had to operate.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the support received during the 1985–86 academic year that I spent at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and to participants in the Social Science Luncheon Seminar at the Institute for helpful comments on an early draft of my essay. Lucille Allsen of the School of Social Science did much of the work that made this volume come together. Members of the Social Change seminar at Empire State College also provided a welcome opportunity to discuss some of these issues. And Frank Fischer, as always, offered insight and support. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Franco Corbetta, a work reformer and friend.