Success and Enterprise: The Significance of Employee Ownership and Participation

This text takes a critical look at employee-ownership, human resource management, and the recent changes in organizational practice and management theory. It examines how many of the ideas have developed and how they work out in practice. The authors compare experiences in several European countries, but draw much of their evidence from an in-depth sutdy of the 19 Dutch enterprises with high levels of employee-ownership and/or participation. These cases represent one end of the spectrum of enterprise initiatives for decentralization and empowerment. As such, they provide an opportunity for exploring the limits and future trends of many current management ideas.