Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms – serie

The effects and impact of employee participation and employee ownership continue to be themes of enduring interest to social scientists from a range of disciplines. The analysis presented in this volume are representative of the best economics research being carried out in the study of labor and empirical studies. Several of the papers deal with the issue of privatization in transition economies, where a large number of newly privatized firms have effectively been transformed into employee owned enterprises. Other key themes covered in this volume are profit sharing in both East and West Europe, the issue of evolutionary transformation of cooperatives into conventional private firms, and the growing importance of the role of social cooperatives in the welfare state.

This volume of "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms" consists of ten original papers. The first five papers address the effects of institutions of governance (at the workplace and corporate levels), including new forms of workplace governance (e.g., self-directed teams), a traditional form (or trade unions) and financial participation schemes. The subsequent three papers turn to the issues of the determinants of the incidence of such institutions, followed by two theoretical contributions. The paper by Tor Eriksson introduces a new survey of participatory employment practices in Danish firms, and connects these practices to productivity gains for the firm and wage gain for workers. Jose Alberto Bayo-Moriones, Pedro Javier Galilea-Salvatierra, and Javier Merino-Diaz de Cerio introduce a new telephone survey of participatory employment practices in 965 manufacturing establishments in Spain, and investigate whether these practices lead to gains for the firm and workers. While the above two papers focus on new institutions of workplace governance, the next paper studies a traditional institution of workplace governance, i.e., trade unions. Chris Doucouliagos and Patrice Laroche conduct a meta-analysis of the effect of unions on productivity growth. All three papers so far concentrate on non-financial aspects of governance. The next two papers tackle such financial aspects. The contribution by Agustin Ros is an empirical study of the effects of employee ownership on effort/shirking and horizontal monitoring based on rich survey data collected by the author on an employee owned firm and 6 comparable private firms.The paper by Everaert and Hildebrandt contributes to the literatures on transition economies and participatory firms by examining the determinants of the incidence of soft budget constraints (SBCs), in particular enterprise ownership structure (including different forms of private ownership). The next three papers turn to the issues of the determinants of participation. Andrew Pendleton, Erik Poutsma, Jos Van Ommeren and Chris Brewster use a unique cross-national survey of financial participation schemes in 2,506 establishments in 14 EU countries, and try to study the determinants of the adoption of such schemes. Christopher Adams uses rich data on 1,153 product line workers in 162 British private sector manufacturing establishments to examine the use of group incentives (profit sharing or employee share ownership) and worker participation in decision making (specifically over the range of tasks performed). The paper by Nicholas Wilson, Hao Zhang, and Andrew Robinson is an empirical study that examines hypotheses arising from a transaction cost economics (TCE) framework to explain employee share ownership. The last two papers are theoretical contributions. Jan Erik Askildsen and Norman Ireland carefully develop a model of bargaining by a union and a firm over future benefits (e.g., a defined benefit pension) when workers may not receive these benefits either because the firm goes out of business before the benefit is to be paid or the worker leaves the firm before the benefit is vested. In his paper "Comparative Systems, Destructive Trade and World Distributive Justice," one of the pioneers on the broad field of participatory and labor managed firms, Jaroslav Vanek, extends earlier work by presenting an analysis of the impact of international trade in today's globalized economy.

This latest volume of "Advances" contains a series of original and innovative empirical and survey papers that investigate theoretical and contemporary issues facing participatory organizations. The first four papers explore the growing area of participatory and labor-managed firms' survival. The second group of three papers offers a number of new approaches and insights into the performance effects of participatory firms, and the final group of papers provides a broad-ranging synthesis and assessment of the experience of employee ownership and participation in transition economies. Collectively, these nine papers truly constitute "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms".

This volume of "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms" consists of twelve original and innovative articles. The first four papers relate to the growing literature on employee participation and firm performance. The second group of papers looks at the impact of ownership structures into managerial compensation and control. The third set of papers analyzes the role of co-operatives in the changing economic environment. The three papers in the final section range from the historical perspective on participation to the role different forms of participation may play in the future. Together, these papers draw on the expertise of a number of leading thinkers in the area and promise the reader a challenge to help deliver practical policies to transform our work world and society. The series: is international in scope; and fills substantial gap in this field. Although its primary focus is economic, the editors welcome analytical studies from related fields.

A number of competing views are swirling around the literature concerning the impact of globalization on the ability of cooperatives to survive. This 10th volume of the "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms" series wants to understand some of these elements in the evolution of cooperatives in a world where globalization seems to be the driving force behind innovative forms of organization. In keeping with the main focus of the economics literature, the volume is focused on worker and producer cooperatives. This issue contains eleven papers and is organized into three parts: the first part collects empirical studies on producers cooperatives in Israel, Italy, Spain and Canada. The second part focuses on theoretical advances in the literature on cooperatives with the objective of understanding the conditions that explain co-ops longevity. Finally the third part documents the expansion into the global markets of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. It contains original research on cooperatives. It focuses on the impact of globalization on the cooperatives performance and survival. It contains a mix of empirical and theoretical research.

This volume includes theoretical and empirical research into changing institutions and employee participation. Topics covered in this title include: the experience with employee ownership in relation to the fast change of institutions in transitional countries including those in Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, and China; the influence of the specific institutional setting on development; e.g. for the Mondragon Group of coops or the Italian Cooperative Associations, development as affected both by the institutional structure within the group and the surrounding institutions; and, the influence of legislation in different countries of conditions for the development of different types of employee participation. It includes: the re-shaping of the role of the employees as company stakeholders and the impact of these changes on employee motivation, effort and productivity; the impact of new employee incentive schemes, reward structures or other incentive mechanisms (if any) on firm productivity and financial performance; evidence of the implementation and effects of the 'employee share-ownership education'; and, the impact of different informal institutions (culture) on the development and performance of different forms of employee participation.

This 12th edition of "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms" contains a stimulating collection of original papers spanning a wide variety of topics. Part 1 of the volume contains three papers on the subject of job design and organizational performance, covering the determinants of multiskilling from a theoretical perspective and also the empirical effect of multiskilling and teams on financial performance. Part 2 of the volume concerns compensation, worker attitudes, and productivity. Papers in this section cover the effect of rules and costs on employer-provided health insurance, majority ownership and executive compensation, worker attitudes towards different forms of employee ownership and variable pay, and an analysis of performance-related pay, unions, and productivity in Italy. Part 3 contains three studies of worker cooperatives and nonprofit organizations in Italy, Spain, and Uruguay. This volume concludes with a debate on free trade and the ecological effects of alternative socio-economic systems.

With the financial crisis and Great Recession, some economists have begun to question the orthodox approach to production and capital/labor relations over the last two to three decades. This orthodoxy has been thrown into question due to concerns of poor corporate decision-making, corporate capture of regulators, perceived rewards for failure, and uneven productivity growth. But a new spirit of introspection and doubt about orthodox approaches has created some impetus leading to greater interest in themes, such as worker ownership, sharing rewards, co-operatives, and employee involvement practices which feature heavily in the "Advances" series. This "new spirit" is apparent for all to see in the 12 contributions to this volume of "Advances" which cover co-operatives; effects of worker participation on firm performance; the diffusion of high involvement management practices; and outcomes for workers (i.e., job satisfaction and wages).

Ownership and decision-making are key issues in the economic restructuring taking place as economies struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, and technological change and globalization continue to place new demands on workers and firms. Corporate, labor, and policy leaders are increasingly recognizing the potential role of employee ownership, cooperatives, profit sharing, and other ways in which employees directly participate in decision-making and financial performance. This volume contains cutting-edge research on the causes and effects of financial and decision-making participation, including results from the United States, European Union, Russia, India, and Basque area of Spain, along with a unique laboratory experiment to probe the real-world findings. Along with consideration of standard economic outcomes are studies that examine job satisfaction in the largest U.S. worker cooperative, and firm survival among cooperatives and ESOP companies. In addition, there are theoretical and thought pieces on the meaning and value of employee ownership in a rapidly changing world economy.

This volume analyses employee participation in under- researched countries and whose economic institutions differ from the Anglo-American context. Part one of the volume is dedicated to China. In a context in which economic decisions made by companies are closely influenced by the political institutions and practices, the extent to which Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) have the ability to make autonomous decisions is not to be taken for granted. The volume explores whether the executive labor market and firms' executive compensation practices differ from the Western context. Evidence on the role of trade unions in Chinese companies is also analyzed. Part two of the volume includes empirical evidence from Europe, Japan, and Korea, and focuses on high-involvement work practices. The main questions that the volume addresses are the incidence and determinants of these practices and their effects on firm performance. Evidence on the incidence contributes to understanding the importance of these practices in an international context, and the analyses on the determinants and effects help understand how the main trade-offs play out in different institutional contexts.

Alternative types of ownership and participatory managerial practices have recently been intensively debated. The Great Recession has revived interest in cooperative and labor-managed organizations. In addition, employee participation in decision-making and financial performance has consistently attracted attention during the last 20 years. The articles in this Volume contribute to both of these topics. The first set of articles studies the relationship among business cycles, alternative forms of ownership, and employee voice. These papers take various theoretical and empirical approaches and investigate many industries and countries. They show how the economic downturn is leading to increased incidence of employee ownership but also undermining employee voice by increasing the incidence of atypical employment. The second set of papers looks inside firms. The topics include the relationship between ownership and innovation and how financial participation and group incentives affect employee attitudes and work effort. The contributions in this volume provide stimulating research in the broad area of participatory and labor-managed organizations.

This volume gathers recent insights into the determinants, developments and outcomes of employee share ownership. It focuses on a number of new emerging themes in the literature and tests some of the relationships using several, notable European datasets. The authors discuss employee share ownership from the perspective of strategic human resource management (SHRM) and present the 'contextual SHRM model,' where employee ownership is influenced by several environmental pressures, which indicated the need for five specific 'fits' of employee ownership. These fits are: fit of employee ownership with strategy of the firm, with the organizational cultural heritage, with the wider social cultural environment; fit with other HRM practices (internal fit); fit with personal characteristics of employees. The authors explore these fits with several new emerging theories and demonstrate what firms that want employee ownership to be an effective HRM policy need to do.