Industrial Democracy and Managers An Explanatory and Critical Perspective

Abstract

Despite the substantial corpus of knowledge on the question of industrial democracy, our understanding of the effects of the main intemational experi ments upon managerial personnel within the enterprise remains deficient. The essential argument of this paper, moreover, is that contrary to popular im pression managerial influence in the workplace would not appear to have been circumscribed by these major developments of the twentieth century. The analysis itself commences with an outline of a general model of industrial democracy in which structural and environmental conditions, subjective factors and the distribution of power are all countenanced. These, then, form the analytical boxes from which a series of more specific forces which have affected actual managerial attitudes and behaviour in key experiments may be readily identified. Thus the principal factors include, at a structural level, the growth of the state, industrial concentration, the social composition of managerial per sonnel, technology, pace of change, economic movements and the institutional structure of trade unions. Secondly, the subjective forces (which encompass the notion of choice) embrace egalitarian-democratic values and the strategies of particular labour movements, the goals of productivity and efficiency, human growth and development theories and the concern to integrate disparate social and occupational groups. Finally, the power factors include not only changing balances amongst the main industrial groups but also new types of conflict in the enterprise itself. The respective impact of these forces are then analysed in terms of four main classes of industrial democracy: (1) managerially-initiated ventures, (2) co-determination, (3) workers' councils and (4) producer co- operatives. Moreover, notwithstanding the varying impress of these factors, we were still able to demonstrate how the role of managerial personnel would appear to be secure in every major instance of the phenomenon under review.