Assessing the Degree of Employee Participation : Guttman Scale Tests for the West German Metalworking Industry

In recent years there has been a widespread growth of producer cooperatives, codetermination, profit-sharing and other participation schemes. This has occurred not only in Western Industrialised countries, including Britain, but also in the developing world, and in some Eastern-bloc 'command' economies. These developments provide social scientists with rich and expanding opportunities for research on self-managed and participatory firms : on their relative survival, growth and productivity rates ; on the interrelationship between participation and human capital formation or the 'quality' of the labour force ; on the implications for wage determination, unionisation, the quality of working life ; and so on.