ABSTRACT
The first group includes various forms of employee participation in decisionmaking, usually referred to as ‘industrial democracy’ (Abell, 1985), ‘participation in control’ (Cable, 1988), or ‘non-material participation’. Such participation can be both direct (e.g., through workers’ councils) and indirect (through employee representatives on company boards) and ranges from information disclosure and consultation, to minority or full parity co-determination (such as the most wellknown system of Mitbestimmung in Germany). Most European countries have experienced both direct and indirect forms of employee participation in decisionmaking,3 enhanced by the promotion of industrial democracy by the European Community, during the 1970s through the encouragement of co-determination laws, and today as part of the Social Charter and the project for the harmonization of company laws.4 The second group includes various forms of employee participation in enterprise performance, usually referred to as ‘economic democracy’ (Abell, 1985), ‘financial participation’ (Cable, 1988), or ‘profit-sharing’ (in the widest sense). Financial participation need not involve the participation of workers in decision-making (depending on the form it takes and other specific arrangements), but in practice makes a strong theoretical case for decisional participation. From a historical perspective, industrial democracy has had a much more important role in most West European countries throughout this century and consequently has also been vastly discussed in the literature, whereas research on economic democracy has been much more limited and, until recently, has been prevalently theoretical.
