WORKER PARTICIPATION & THE RESHAPING OF CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES: IS ‘HRM’ NOW HEGEMONIC?

1. WORKER PARTICIPATION & THE RESHAPING OF CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES: IS ‘HRM’ NOW HEGEMONIC? Miguel Martínez Lucio University of Manchester

2. 1. Introduction: Issues of Participation and Perspective • Radical approaches to questions of worker participation • The emergence of participation spaces and perspectives • The move to the micro and the workplace • Management and participation • The contribution of radical interventions • The limitations of radical interventions • Amnesia and forgotten legacies • The constrained approach and fragmented forms of engagement • Academic conventions and spaces

3. 2. Radical Origins • Pessimism and the Participation • The Limits on Worker Action • Concerns with Trade Unions • Early Debates and the Focus on Control

4. The opening of the political • Interest in Ideology and Argumentation • Questions of autonomy and the state • Questions of autonomy and the labour process • Regulation as a political process: regulatory space

5. 3. Participation and Politics: an illustration of positions/changes • Participation as Control and Incorporation at the Level of the State • Participation and Collective Bargaining as Incorporation Towards • The role of worker regulation and negotiation • The importance of autonomous and independent approaches to negotiation • Defending social gains and state engagement (has the latter been shift defensive/ reactive?)

6. 4. The Context of Forgotten Legacies • Co-operatives and debates • Worker Control in the 1970s • Yugoslavia and workers control • Industrial democracy through supervision and ownership

7. 5. Management and the Appropriation of the ‘Project’ of Participation • The game between control and autonomy • Consensus and control • The politics of the employment relation From a ‘game’ to a ‘strategy’ • The move to a more concerted attempt at engaging and redefining participation – the ‘new wave’ • Linking participation into corporate ideologies and ethos

8. 6. Dimensions of the New Participation • Symbolic participation and cultural incorporation • Direct Participation and Social Exploitation • The Individual, Participation and Motivation • Indirect participation and the partnership frame

9. 7. The forging of points of engagement A. Responses to new forms of participation: • The critique of ‘HRM’ consistency • The critique of ‘HRM’ development • The critique of HRM effects B. Industrial Relations and new forms of participation • Attempts to re-bundle new participation around fairness – the re-inscription of indirect participation and unions

10. C. Struggle and New Forms of Participation • Participation as a space around new struggles emerge • Control, measures, workspace, customers and purpose as new points of engagement

11. 8. Challenges in Contemporary Debates • The micro level focus of debates – ‘the team in isolation’ • Where is the state beyond the employer role? • Ironies of defensive strategies (Thompson) • The ongoing challenge of re-imagining work and voice (Hyman) • The focus on effects and individuals • The unease with the question of governance and structure • Failure to discuss management as a social and political phenomena

12. Autonomy forgotten • Forgotten legacies and their stigmatization • Academic convention and paradigms • The current economic context and the absence of discussion on alternative regulation • Is the debate constrained and contained? • Hegemony less as the dominance of the neo-liberal/’NMP’/HRM but more as the fragmentation and limitation of debate – absence of altematives and constrained spaces for critique