ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews existing studies on workers’ attitudes towards the reorganisation of the workplace, works council and union during the transitional period. Overall the literature concludes that workers in east Germany are individualistic, passive and instrumental towards collective activities. The chapter then reviews the various explanations of workers’ assumed reluctance to engage in collective activities, thus the reasons for the assumed lack of cultural support for labour institutions that are offered in the literature. The increasing individualisation of east German workers is characterised as one core hypothesis of this literature.
