Workplace Democracy

Adult Education contradicts the theorists and practitioners who claim that empowering organizations can only be created when those at the top decide to share power. The emancipating educational processes are the tools of those who work within systems whether the issue is literacy, civil rights or democracy in the workplace. The Adult Education movement has linked its mission to cultivating the growth of democratic processes. Those people who work in organizations and are trying to improve their understanding of how to reshape the organization into a democratic workplace will find this useful.

The development of the welfare state has been accompanied by greater freedoms being granted to workers in industrialized capitalist countries. The themes of this volume concern how governments, trade unions, and workers have acted to promote economic growth and economic accountability with active industrial or worker self-management policies. The key dimensions of economic, social, and political change in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden are analyzed in the book's essays--focusing on workplace reforms and economic management in a variety of national settings.

Democracy is under threat from a variety of forces originating in the transnational capitalist economy. Dryzek outlines these forces, considers how democracy might be defended against them, and explores the prospects for the democratic impulse.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Organizations Challenged by Leisure "Rational" Versus "Natural" Model Facing Social Conflicts in Organizations Utopia or a Historical Necessity? Toward a Participatory Model Dialectics of Organizations Implementation of Participatory Management Index

Tsiganou explores the enormous diversity of worker participative schemes across national contexts. Using a historical comparative approach, schemes are examined in developed countries--the U.S.A., Japan, Sweden, Norway, England, Germany, and France; and centrally planned less developed socialist countries--Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China, and the Soviet Union. Conditions under which participative schemes emerge are addressed and reasons for similarities or differences among these schemes are examined. This is not a detailed country by country comparison. It is an explanation of the enormous diversity of schemes through comparative analysis.

As Murphy and Peck and the analysts brought together for this collection point out, self-government or democracy does not occur in a vacuum. Democracy will occur only when personal autonomy, critical thought, and the desire for self-government are encouraged by social institutions. In this collection, each writer examines a key institution within society and explores how that particular institution can be made more open and accessible. In the process they show that democratization involves far more than instituting a few democratic practices. They emphasize that the democratization of culture is crucial.

This foundational text makes use of advances in cognition & social theory to demonstrate how & why schools & teachers must reorient traditional approaches to vocational education. The book serves as a main text or as supplementary reading in teacher training courses & will be a valuable sourcebook for administrators & education scholars. Contents: Foreword, Fred Schied. THE NATURE OF WORK. A Sense of Purpose. Modernism & the Evolution of the Technocratic Mind. Power & the Development of the Modernist Economy. Good Work, Bad Work, & the Debate over Ethical Labor. THE HISTORICAL DIMENSIONS OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. The Origins of Vocational Education. The Progressive Debate, the Victory of Vocationalism, & the Institutionalization of Schooling for Work. Failures & Reforms: The Recent History of Vocational Education. COPING WITH & DIRECTING CHANGE. Post-Fordism & Technopower: The Changing Economic & Political Arena. Democratic Post-Fordist Workplaces & Debating the Changing Purposes of Vocational Education. Confronting & Rethinking Educational Theory: Critical Vocational Pedagogy & Workers as Researchers. RACE, CLASS, & GENDER. Plausible Deniability: The Skeleton in Vocational Education's Closet. A Touch of Class. Accounting for Gender. Howlin' Wolf at the Door: Race, Racism, & Vocational Education. THE ROLE OF LABOR & UNIONS IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Democratic Unionism in the Global Economy & Corporate-Directed Vocational Education. The New Unionism & the Struggle for a Democratic Social Movement. A VISION OF GOVERNMENT, VOCATIONAL EDUCATION, & THE FUTURE. Worker Civics: The Decline of the Nation-State & the Rise of Corporate Government. A Reconceptualized Government for the Twenty-First Century.

The collapse of central planning was hailed as evidence of the economic and moral superiority of capitalism over any possible alternative. The essays in this book provide a thorough theoretical and empirical critique of this orthodoxy.