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This chapter examines traditional features and recent changes in share ownership. It then reviews traditional aspects of corporate management and recent legislative changes. It considers the Japanese employment system and cooperative management-labour relations. It looks at recent changes and at legal developments designed to cope with such changes. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of the current situation and future prospects.

This chapter addresses the introduction of the executive officer system as an alternative to the traditional insider board structure. As a result, since 1997 board sizes have decreased and a greater separation has been made between monitoring and management responsibilities. Some firms have also introduced outside directors and performance-related compensation schemes, such as stock options. The extent of these reforms among Japanese firms is examined using a survey-based Corporate Governance Score (CGS) for each corporation. Higher CGS scores are associated with better performance, a higher percentage of foreign shareholders, and a lower percentage of stable shareholders. However, among firms exposed to capital market pressures, the presence of strong employee participation also has a significant positive impact on the degree of reform and suggests a strong mutual reliance on capital markets and long-term employment among strongly performing Japanese firms.

To be empowered means to have the ability and resources to take key decisions. Yet there is an immediate and important slippage of language. This chapter reviews debates on power and turns to employee participation, shows why participation matters, and considers evidence as to the extent and meaning of participation. Organizations are structures of power. People at the top rarely give up power voluntarily, making collaboration between different groups a difficult proposition. Collaboration readily breaks down with a reversion to (command-and-control-based) type, and the idea of managerial prerogative is deeply embedded in law and concrete practice; participation exists at best on the edges of a system structured in very different ways. Empowerment relates in some way to the rights of employees and their recognition by their employer. The alternative approach is one of ‘hire and fire’ in which the employment contract is reduced as far as possible to a market exchange.

This chapter describes two decades of effort at AT&T, starting with shopfloor worker participation with labour-management supervision; and gradually extending to dealing with strategic concerns including technological change, marketing, productivity, etc. Despite success in both economic and human terms, the effort ultimately fell victim to turbulence in the telecommunications industry. The chapter describes the importance of management and union leadership.

An important objective of the philosophy underlying the Health and Safety Work Act, 1974, was to incorporate employees as participatory rather than as passive agents in the workplace. This chapter considers the legislative and institutional arrangements for worker participation in the railways. In particular, it examines how much was known about the system by managers and the workforce. It also considers whether the objective of constituting everyone in the workplace as a participant in health and safety regulation was being met.

This chapter analyses the action-based processes of knowing and organizing surrounding the coming into existence of one of the most advanced car manufacturing plants in the world: Fiat's Melfi assembly plant. This new ‘green field’ factory features a lean production organization, work flow based on assembly lines and teams, advanced applications of IT to production management and control, and extensive reliance on total quality management. Beyond technical specifications, however, the most interesting feature of the plant is that it has been built with the active involvement of the workforce. Indeed, the Fiat management conceived the whole Melfi project as a learning experiment based on a greenfield strategy where the future workers would literally build the factory, including the place and the setting where they would be assembling cars. The experiment had no antecedents in Fiat's history and the whole project relied on a young and inexperienced workforce.

For more than two decades, the United Kingdom has tried to encourage shared capitalist practices by offering tax advantages to firms that link pay to profits, provide company shares to workers, encourage workers to save through stock options, or develop approved share-option plans. Behind the desire to increase shared compensation in the United Kingdom is the widespread belief that shared capitalist arrangements will create a better work culture with improved productivity and commitment by employees. Existing studies on profit sharing, employee ownership, and employee participation lend general support to this proposition, but these studies also show considerable variability in the effects of practices on firm performance. This chapter examines how a shared mode of compensation has affected firm performance in the United Kingdom. It uses a 1999 survey of the shared compensation strategies used by a sample of UK listed companies between 1995 and 1998; the 1998 Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) of some 2,000 UK establishments or workplaces; and the 1990–1998 longitudinal WERS panel survey of nearly 900 workplaces.

The extent and form of arrangements that allow workers to participate in management decision-making have been central issues within Industrial Relations since the inception of the field. This chapter reviews contemporary debate on worker participation between unitary, pluralist, and critical researchers. Two forms of participation are the main focus of the chapter. Labour–management partnerships, designed to place trade union and employer relations on a more cooperative footing are the first of these types and the chapter reviews the debate over partnership between pluralist advocates and critical opponents. Management-authored initiatives to secure employee engagement constitute the second type and the chapter considers the unitary case for engagement and pluralist and critical critique. The chapter notes a shift in writing about participation away from a traditional debate over collective participation through unions, towards new forms of direct participation advocated by those within the unitary tradition.

This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of the case study results. It identifies the type-specific patterns of corporate governance, employee participation, and work systems in the industry. The findings show that there is widespread diversity of developmental trajectories within the industry, and that the dynamics of governance compromises vary not just between countries but also within them. This suggests that we need to take into greater account, not just the national level institutions that regulate and facilitate such compromises, but also the agency of the key actors in the various governance arenas. Notably, we have seen that where employee voice is exercised through strong unions, works councils, or even representative committees as in ESOPs in the United States, then significant influence can be exerted that advances the agenda for work systems that are characterized by high-road jobs.

This chapter explores how the private employer-sponsored defined contribution system fared during the financial market implosion followed by a prolonged macroeconomic downturn. While data are still preliminary, we conclude that many plans did well, resulting in little change in employer sponsorship and employee participation. Moreover, account balances and contributions have recovered, boding well for the future.

How much ‘say’ should employees have in the running of organizations and what form should ‘voice’ take? For some, employee voice is a synonym for trade union representation. For others, voice is a means of enhancing employee commitment and organizational performance. Some advocate workers’ control as an alternative to conventional capitalist organizations which are run for shareholders. There is thus both a moral and a political argument for a measure of democracy at work, as well as a business case argument which views voice as a potential link in the quest for increased organizational performance. The key debate for employment relations is which of the approaches ‘works best’ in balancing competitiveness and productivity, on the one hand, and fair treatment of workers and social justice on the other. The book offers a critical assessment of the main concepts and models of voice in the UK and Europe.

The German model of industrial relations has come under increasing pressure from a variety of sources in recent years, including reunification, market liberalization, and privatization, changes in employment structures and the growth of new economic sectors, as well as recession and rising unemployment. This chapter examines the effects of these pressures on the role of employee participation and collective bargaining across the German private sector, particularly in relation to the emergence of a newer, unorganized system—based on emerging sectors and new forms of working—alongside the traditional organized system of industrial relations. Much in the future depends on the interpenetration of the ‘layers’ of institutional development, that is, whether the traditional layers of employment will tend towards the emerging layers based on individualized forms of working. Successful union responses will prove critically important if further fragmentation is to be countered

This chapter contributes to the debate on corporate sustainability by outlining the role of human resource management (HRM). It focuses on the quest for corporate environmental performance in the context of the contested employment relationship, acknowledging that workplace actions and their consequences are socially embedded. The chapter covers a wide range of theories and research on the sociology and psychology of organizational sustainability. It begins with a brief historical overview of HRM and provides an original definition of a low-carbon work system (LCWS) before discussing a theoretical framework for examining HRM interventions to create sustainable, low-carbon workplaces. It argues that future research should explore the contribution of employee voice, through employee participation processes, to the achievement of workplace sustainability. The chapter concludes by exploring the thesis that future research needs to be more sensitive to the broader socio-cultural phenomenon that organizations are embedded in society.

This chapter presents a proposal to promote firms run by their employees and extensive employee involvement in the governance of conventional firms. Democratic firms build up capital for future generations, keep more profit in the firm, and have more powerful incentives to keep the firm in operation in the medium and long term than investor-owned firms. They involve younger generations in decisions. Although labour-managed firms may not necessarily be environment-friendly without appropriate regulation, their negative impact is likely to be lighter than that of conventional firms. Democratic firms may also indirectly benefit future generations by limiting unchecked firm growth and the loss of skills and jobs that can have dramatic compounded effects on communities far into the future. Labour-managed firms are efficient, but incentives for individual entrepreneurship may have to be retained in a labour-managed economy. Multi-stakeholder governance is proposed in sectors that are not appropriate for private ownership.

This chapter explores the institutions and policies that influence the health of working-age Germans and Americans. Work (or the absence of paid work) is one of the most important determinants of health in advanced industrial societies. The nature of one's work differentially determines one's risk of unemployment, which is strongly linked to heightened rates of mortality and morbidity. Work also bears directly on health through potential exposure to toxic agents and other physical dangers. No less important are the psychosocial dimensions of the work environment. Substantial evidence links greater employee control of the workplace to better health outcomes. Conversely, a relative absence of worker power is detrimental to health. The development of employee participation in German firm management began in the 1920s, culminating in the Codetermination Law of 1976. That law mandates that workers' representatives fill half the supervisory board seats in all firms with more than two thousand employees. The chapter then considers the links between German workers' enhanced psychosocial work environments and their superior health status in comparison to their American counterparts.