An Economic Perspective on Employee Participation

Author(s):  
David Marsden ◽  
Almudena Cañibano

The approach of this article is to look at participation against the canvas of the employment relationship, its organization, core processes, and their outcomes for organizational performance and social well-being. The article starts with a brief historical overview of developments over the past forty years because it is useful to set theories in their wider historical context: why people posed the questions they did at a particular time. It then reviews a selection of the major theoretical approaches that illustrate the broad tent which encompasses the ‘economic approach’. The article considers the diffusion and the ecology of participatory practices and how these have been interpreted. Next, it presents a partial survey of recent quantitative work on the performance effects of participatory practices updating that of Levine and Tyson. Finally, the article examines some of the conceptual problems posed by these studies.

2021 ◽  
pp. 501-520
Author(s):  
Tyler J. VanderWeele ◽  
Claudia Trudel-Fitzgerald ◽  
Paul V. Allin ◽  
Colin Farrelly ◽  
Guy Fletcher ◽  
...  

Measures of well-being have proliferated over the past decades. Very little guidance has been available about which measures to use in particular contexts. This chapter provides a series of recommendations, based on the present state of knowledge and the existing measures available, of which measures might be preferred in which contexts. The recommendations came out of an interdisciplinary workshop on the measurement of well-being and are shaped around the number of items that can be included in a survey and also based on the differing potential contexts and purposes of data collection such as, for example, government surveys, multiuse cohort studies, or studies specifically about psychological well-being. The recommendations are not intended to be definitive but instead to stimulate discussion and refinement and provide guidance to those relatively new to the study of well-being.


Organization ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Decker

Research on organizational spaces has not considered the importance of collective memory for the process of investing meaning in corporate architecture. Employing an archival ethnography approach, practices of organizational remembering emerge as a way to shape the meanings associated with architectural designs. While the role of monuments and museums are well established in studies of collective memory, this research extends the concept of spatiality to the practices of organizational remembering that focus on a wider selection of corporate architecture. By analyzing the historical shift from colonial to modernist architecture for banks and retailers in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s on the basis of documents and photographs from three different companies, this article shows how archival sources can be used to untangle the ways in which companies seek to ascribe meaning to their architectural output. Buildings allude to the past and the future in a range of complex ways that can be interpreted more fully by reference to the archival sources and the historical context of their creation. Social remembering has the potential to explain why and how buildings have meaning, while archival ethnography offers a new research approach to investigate changing organizational practices.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 3070-3095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Wood ◽  
Chidiebere Ogbonnaya

High-involvement management was introduced as a means of overcoming economic crises, but it has been argued that the inevitability of cost-cutting measures when organizations face such crises would undermine its efficacy. This article first presents theories of why tensions may exist between high-involvement management and actions typically taken by management during recessions, such as wage and employment freezes. It then reports research aimed at testing whether the performance effects of high-involvement management were lower in organizations where management took such actions to combat the post-2008 recession, due to their adverse effects on employees’ job satisfaction and well-being—and even whether high-involvement management still had a performance premium after the recession. Using data from Britain’s Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2011, the research shows that both dimensions of high-involvement management—role- and organizational-involvement management—continued to be positively associated with economic performance as the economy came out of recession. Recessionary actions were negatively related to both employee job satisfaction and well-being, while job satisfaction mediated the relationship between role-involvement management and economic performance, which is consistent with mutual-gains theory. However, recessionary action reduced the positive effect that role-involvement management had on job satisfaction and well-being and thus may have reduced its positive performance effects. In the case of organizational-involvement management, it reduced the level of job dissatisfaction and ill-being, suggesting that it may provide workers with more information and greater certainty about the future.


2020 ◽  
pp. 133-139
Author(s):  
Sanatan Ratna ◽  
B Kumar

In the past few decades, there has been lot of focus on the issue of sustainability. This has occurred due to the growing concerns related to climate change and the growing awareness about environmental concerns. Also, the competition at global level has led to the search for the most sustainable route in the industries. The current research work deals with the selection of green supplier in a Nickle coating industry based on certain weighted green attributes. For this purpose, a hybrid tool comprising of Fuzzy AHP (Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) is used. The Fuzzy AHP is used for assigning proper weights to the selected criteria for supplier evaluation, while VIKOR is used for final supplier selection based on the weighted criteria. The three criterions for green supplier selection are, Ecological packaging, Corporate socio-environmental responsibility and Staff Training. The outcome of the integrated model may serve as a steppingstone to other SMEs in different sectors for selecting the most suitable supplier for addressing the sustainability issue.


Author(s):  
Corey Kai Nelson Schultz

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining the class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in the films. Each chapter analyzes a figure’s socio-historical context, its filmic representation, and its recurring cinematic tropes in order to understand how they create what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretize around particular times, places, generations, and classes that are captured and evoked in art – and charts how this felt experience has changed over the past forty years of China’s economic reforms. The book argues that that Jia’s cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social change, but also as an effort to engage the audience’s emotional responses during this period of China’s massive and fast-paced transformation.


Author(s):  
Robert Klinck ◽  
Ben Bradshaw ◽  
Ruby Sandy ◽  
Silas Nabinacaboo ◽  
Mannie Mameanskum ◽  
...  

The Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach is an Aboriginal community located in northern Quebec near the Labrador Border. Given the region’s rich iron deposits, the Naskapi Nation has considerable experience with major mineral development, first in the 1950s to the 1980s, and again in the past decade as companies implement plans for further extraction. This has raised concerns regarding a range of environmental and socio-economic impacts that may be caused by renewed development. These concerns have led to an interest among the Naskapi to develop a means to track community well-being over time using indicators of their own design. Exemplifying community-engaged research, this paper describes the beginning development of such a tool in fall 2012—the creation of a baseline of community well-being against which mining-induced change can be identified. Its development owes much to the remarkable and sustained contribution of many key members of the Naskapi Nation. If on-going surveying is completed based on the chosen indicators, the Nation will be better positioned to recognize shifts in its well-being and to communicate these shifts to its partners. In addition, long-term monitoring will allow the Naskapi Nation to contribute to more universal understanding of the impacts of mining for Indigenous peoples.


1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-190
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood

This book, hereinafter referred to as the Guide, has been developed for those social analysts (e.g., anthropologists, sociologists, and human geographers) who have had little or no practical experience in applying their knowledge as development practitioners. In the past, development projects would be analysed from a narrow financial and economic perspective. But with the evolution of thinking on development, this narrow financial and economic aspect has now been broadened to include the impact on society as the very meaning of development has now come to symbolise social change. Thus, development is not restricted only to plans and figures; the human environment in its entirety is now considered for analysis while designing and implementing development projects.


Author(s):  
Maryana Bil ◽  
Olha Mulska

The article defines the content of welfare as a measure of socially oriented efficiency of economic growth, which reflects the appropriate level of providing the population with material and spiritual goods with the formation of favourable conditions for human development and capitalization of human potential in a competitive mobile space. The modern theory of welfare testifies to the deepening of scientific discussions on the transformation of economic welfare into mobile and inclusive, as well as the opposition of competitive and social protection welfare policy. Another milestone in the evolution of welfare theory is the individualization of its provision. Conditions of competition and mobility increase the importance of households in providing their well-being with further reflection on the processes of economic growth of the community, region, and state. This gives grounds to actualize the issues of household welfare research and strengthening economic growth based on behavioural economics. The needs, interests, motives, and incentives determine the economic behaviour of households. At higher levels, it defines an economic culture that is closely linked to the national mentality. In this regard, the main models of economic and social behaviour of households – socialization, adaptation, integration, values, regulation, and the definition of financial development strategies are outlined. Theoretical approaches to the explanation of economic behaviour are generalized, namely religious-ethical, psychological, substantive theories, theories of motivations and acquired needs, process theories, theories of justice, and others. Based on the ideas of foreign scientists, the main determinants of the economic policy of households are proposed. Political, stabilizing, and economic determinants are distinguished in the group of general determinants. In the group of determinants directly related to households, the financial, demographic, cultural, social, empirical, and psychological are suggested. The author’s emphasis is placed on the importance of the impact of financial determinants of the households’ economic behaviour, the central place among which is occupied by savings.


Author(s):  
Fanie du Toit

Reconciliation emphasizes relationships as a crucial ingredient of political transition; this book argues for the importance of such a relational focus in crafting sustainable political transitions. Section I focuses on South Africa’s transition to democracy—how Mandela and De Klerk persuaded skeptical constituencies to commit to political reconciliation, how this proposal gained momentum, and how well the transition resulted in the goal of an inclusive and fair society. In developing a coherent theory of reconciliation to address questions such as these, I explain political reconciliation from three angles and thereby build a concept of reconciliation that corresponds largely with the South African experience. In Section II, these questions lead the discussion beyond South Africa into some of the prominent theoretical approaches to reconciliation in recent times. I develop typologies for three different reconciliation theories: forgiveness, agonism, and social restoration. I conclude in Section III that relationships created through political reconciliation, between leaders as well as between ordinary citizens, are illuminated when understood as an expression of a comprehensive “interdependence” that precedes any formal peace processes between enemies. I argue that linking reconciliation with the acknowledgment of interdependence emphasizes that there is no real alternative to reconciliation if the motivation is the long-term well-being of one’s own community. Without ensuring the conditions in which an enemy can flourish, one’s own community is unlikely to prosper sustainably. This theoretical approach locates the deepest motivation for reconciliation in choosing mutual well-being above the one-sided fight for exclusive survival at the other’s cost.


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