The micro-politics of worker participation: Interests, understandings, and consequences of employee involvement.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the practice of Employee Involvement (EI) with an eye toward adjudicating among rival claims concerning its impact on ordinary employees. Most students of EI approach it from a distance, producing often superficial accounts, in which EI is seen as either empowering or coopting workers. Conspicuously absent from this scholarship are the views and experiences of the shopfloor participants themselves. Indeed, we know virtually nothing about how ordinary employees understand and act upon their self-perceived interests in relation to such programs. EI's potential for organizing resistance to management prerogative on the plant level remains unexplored. Seeking to address this lacuna, my research investigates an automobile components-manufacturing plant where a committee of shopfloor employees and lower-level managers designed, piloted, and attempted to diffuse their own EI program. Specifically, my goal is to reconstruct the missing phenomenological dimension of this process: how, during the current economic crisis facing the auto industry, EI proponents defined and pursued their interests through an innovative participatory program. Without such a shopfloor perspective, it is difficult to determine both the consequences of EI on the working lives of its participants and its future as a strategy in employment relations. This case study suggests that shopfloor employees understand the complexity of EI programs, recognizing both the attendant risks and opportunities. They realize that, under some conditions, EI can serve as a vehicle for organizing resistance on the shopfloor. The most important conditions appear to be a collective memory of past managerial successes and failures, an economic crisis that calls forth some kind of remedial action, and a credible and legitimate cadre of leaders to implement strategies. This change attempt reveals the use of EI as a form of resistance not typically elucidated in the literature. Consequently, it challenges reigning theory on EI and contributes to the development of a new theoretical framework for understanding it.