Workplace Participation, Vicki Smith (editor)

Research in the Sociology of Work

Volume 16: Worker Participation:
Current Research and Future Trends

2006

Professor Vicki Smith, editor
Department of Sociology
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
916-752-0782
email: vasmith@ucdavis.edu

Volume 16 of RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK offers cutting-edge articles on the character and implications of workplace participation. Chapter authors examine various outcomes related to participation programs -- ways in which participation schemes are socially constructed and negotiated; the meanings that workers attach to opportunities for involvement in the workplace; participation and consent in alternative organizations such as cooperatives and collectives; and theoretical treatments that bring new insights to our understanding of workplace participation. Methodologically pluralist and concerned less with specific productivity effects of worker participation, this volume highlights participation's social-structural, social-constructionist, and meta-theoretical dimensions.

Table of Contents

Vicki Smith, Introduction: "Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends"

Part I: Worker Participation in Contemporary Corporate Workplaces

Steven Peter Vallas, "Theorizing Teamwork under Contemporary Capitalism"

Joshua L. Carreiro, "Organizational Narratives and the Construction of Resistance: Union Organizing at a 'Progressive' Company"

Michael J. Handel, "The Effect of Participative Work Systems on Employee Earnings"

Nancy Plankey Videla, "Gendered Contradictions: Managers and Women Workers in Self-Managed Teams"

Jeremy Reynolds, "You Get Paid for That? Job and Establishment Level Variations in the Use of Incentive Compensation"

Jeffrey S. Rothstein, "Selective Participation: Controlling Workers' Input at General Motors"

Part II: Recent Trends in Cooperatives

George Cheney, "Democracy at Work Within the Market: Reconsidering the Potential"

Joan S. M. Meyers, "Workplace Democracy Comes of Age: Economic Stability, Growth, and Workforce Diversity"

Joyce Rothschild and Amy Tomchin, "Can Collectivist-Democracy Bring Gender Equality? The Efforts at Twin Oaks"

Raymond Russell, Robert Hanneman, and Shlomo Getz, "Demographic and Environmental Influences on the Diffusion of Change Among the Israeli Kibbutzim, 1990-2001"

Joel Schoening, "Cooperative Entrepreneurialism: Reconciling Democratic Values with Business Demands at a Worker-Owned Firm"

Part III: Mediating Worker Participation: The Labor Movement and the State

Esther B. Neuwirth, "Opportunities and Challenges Facing New Workforce Institutions: A Close-up Analysis of an Alternative Staffing Service"

Frank Ridzi and Payal Banerjee, "The Spirit of Outsourcing: Corporate and State Regulation of
Labor under the H-1B Visa and TANF Policies in the U.S."

Vicki Smith, Heather Kohler Flynn, and Jonathan Isler, "Finding Jobs and Building Careers: Reproducing Inequality in State-Sponsored Job Search Organizations"