Oxford University Press International Handbook of Participation in Organizations: Volume I: Organizational Democracy: Taking Stock: v.1

This series provides policymakers, practitioners, and academics with works of reference on significant developments in participative practice in organizations. This first volume examines the pattern of trends towards participation, co-determination, self-management, and co-operatives in the 1970s and 1980s. There have, in recent times, been widespread and severe setbacks to the progress of democratization which gained inexorable momentum in the 1950s and 1960s. The contributors examine the forces at work in the past decade and the influence they have exerted in this area. They ask what ideas, forms, and processes have been stifled, and what tendencies have been developed. The authors, eminent specialists in many disciplines and from many countries, give both practitioners and theoreticians new insights on which to base future action and further research. They conclude that organizational democracy has not been baulked, but has in fact adapted its forms and structures in response to concurrent changes in society.