Filling the Vacuum in New Management Practice? Lessons from US Employee-Owned Firms

Abstract

In this paper we explore the way in which Anglo-American capitalism is evolving to meet the competitive challenges of a global economy. A wide range of scholars, policymakers, and business leaders now argue that the post-Fordist economy requires greater levels of employee involvement, participation, and empowerment, and a new set of management practices have been developed to secure this new culture of work. In this paper we explore these developments and point to the different ways in which terms such as involvement, empowerment, participation, and partnership can be mobilised in the workplace. Moreover, research suggests that new management practices and cultures of work have evolved in different ways across space, crafting an uneven geography of new management practice. In this regard, we look at the ways in which some employee-owned firms in Ohio, America, have been the arena for considerable managerial experiment in fostering employee participation. Although we acknowledge the limitations of employee ownership, empirical material from two majority employee-owned firms illustrates the way in which employees have been able to take a greater role in the business. Employee ownership is much further advanced in the United States than the United Kingdom, and there is scope for building on US experiences in the United Kingdom.The Ohio Center for Employee Ownership^ conducts training sessions for supervisors in employee-owned firms. One of the games they play is designed to teach participants the importance of management style. One trainee is asked to take on the role of an authoritarian manager, another a democrat and the third, that of a pseudo-democrat (a manager who asks people what they think and then promptly ignores them, follows a contrary line of action and/or belittles the ideas suggested). After a short period of role playing it becomes clear that the authoritarian and the democrat are making much better progress with their staff than the pseudo-democrat. The workers under the jurisdiction of the pseudo-democrat grow increasingly angry as they realise their expectations are not being met. Their morale plummets, they have no commitment to the success of the business, and they sometimes end up going on strike. If managers are going to embrace the cause of workplace democracy and employee involvement and participation, this training exercise would suggest that such a strategy needs to be based on relations of trust. Indeed, one of the key lessons to emerge from recent research into new management practice or human resource management (HRM) is the need for mutual trust and respect between workers and those who employ them. The overcoming of long-established traditions of adversarialism is a serious challenge to the development of genuinely new workplace relations.

Buying into Capitalism? Employee Ownership in a Disconnected Era

“…It begs the question whether there are some organizational forms, such as employee ownership, which can at least in part insulate their workers from the potential adverse effects encapsulated by the DCT? Indeed, some researchers claim that within this new turbulent landscape, employee ownership can offer an effective means of ‘saving jobs and anchoring capital in communities’ by ‘changing workplace relations and introducing workplace relations on the basis of trust’ (Wills and Lincoln : 1509).…”

The Workplace at the Millennium: New Geographies of Employment

“…A rich theme of geographical enquiry has thus come into being, concentrating on the following areas of enquiry: 1. flexibility, contingent labour, and precarious work (see Allen and Henry, 1996;Peck and Theodore, 1998;Reimer, 1998;1999a;1999b;Tooke, 2000); 2. gender and the changing labour market (see Hanson and Pratt, 1995;Henry and Massey, 1995;Jarvis, 1999;McDowell, 1991;Perrons, 1998); 2. cultures of work and the embodiment of employment (see Crang, 1994;McDowell, 1997;McDowell and Court, 1994;Wright, 1997); 4. new management practices in the workplace (see Cumbers, 1996;Hudson, 1989;Tomaney, 1994;Wills and Lincoln, 1999); 5. geographies of local labour regulation (see Hanson and Pratt, 1995;Haughton and Peck, 1996;Jonas, 1996;Jones, 1998;Martin, 1995;Peck, 1996;Peck and Jones, 1994;Rutherford, 1998); 6. the regulation of unemployment (see Martin and Sunley, 1999;Peck, 1998a;1998b); 7. geographies of union organisation (see Clark, 1989;Herod, 1995;Hudson and Sadler, 1986;Martin et al, 1996;Massey and Painter, 1989;Wills, 1996;. This special collection of papers, published in this and the next issue of Environment and Planning A, arose from a session held at the 1999 RGS^IBG Conference in Leicester during January 1999.…”

Trade unionism and partnership in practice: evidence from the Barclays–Unifi agreement

“…It is argued that corporations should focus on skills and training to increase employee productivity, flexibility and innovation at work. In so doing, it is suggested that firms can no longer rely on the 'command and control' of Taylorist management practised in the past but should seek to empower employees and let initiative fly (see Reich, 1991;Streeck, 1995;Wills and Lincoln, 1999). Employers and their employees, it is argued, will find mutual gains in increased productivity on the one hand and engagement in more interesting and secure jobs on the other.…”