ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes a favourable conjunctures approach to industrial democracy from evolutionary and cyclical approaches. It outlines the range of variables that can be said to influence the pattern of industrial democracy and articulates the nature of the relationships between these variables in a favourable conjunctures model. The chapter demonstrates how such a model can be applied to comparative analysis of industrial democracy by briefly examining the debates on industrial democracy. The historical development of the idea of industrial democracy may be traced to a number of developmental channels that, in their classic paper, Dachler and Wilpert referred to as: democratic theory, socialist theory, human growth and development theory and a productivity or efficiency orientation. A favourable conjunctures model can be used to account for similarities and differences in patterns of participation over time and across social formations.
