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

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

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

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

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?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

 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