CATHERINE J. IVANCIC AND JOHN LOGUE

In 1906 the German sociologist Werner Sombart published a provocative book
titled Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (Why is there
no Socialism in the United States?). His problem was a simple one. The United
States was the world's most advanced capitalistic country. Yet, despite Marx, it had
the weakest socialist movement in the industrial world. Here was American
exceptionalism at its most outrageous: a direct violation of the laws of history and
of scientific socialism. ¹

American exceptionalism has frustrated many Europeans since Sombart's
day, including most of those interested in industrial and economic democracy. In
industrial democracy--which we define as employee participation in management
at the department, plant, and company level--and economic democracy--defined as
employee co-ownership--the United States defies generalization drawn from other
industrial nations' experience. It is not that the United States is genuinely sui
generis; there are certainly points of commonality with the experience of other
industrial democracies. Yet the patterns of American historical development in this
area, as in so many others, are different from those of European democracies.

When the European nations established works councils in the aftermath of
World War II, the American wartime equivalents were rapidly dismantled. Although
American military authorities in Germany accepted codetermination in the coal and
steel industries in the American and British occupation zones, there was no
presumption that comparable measures were desirable in the United States. As one
European nation after another moved to expand organized labor's influence inside
larger corporations in the 1960s and 1970s through various forms of consultation,
codetermination, expanded bargaining rights, and board representation, the issue of
an expansion of labor's influence was never placed on the American political
agenda.

Yet the United States, where the idea of industrial and economic
democracy long seemed moribund, has begun to move in the same direction as its
European counterparts. Since the mid-1970s, the issues of employee participation
and ownership have been brought to the fore within the American private sector.
Characteristically, it has occurred with the same disregard for the "laws of history"

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