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Employee Involvement and Workplace Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2020

Roberto Frega Open the ORCID record for Roberto Frega [Opens in a new window]
Roberto Frega*
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Centre Marc Bloch
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Abstract

The article aims to bridge divides between political theory and management and organization studies in theorizing workplace democracy. To achieve this aim, the article begins by introducing a new definition of democracy which, it is contended, is better suited than mainstream accounts to highlight the democratizing potential of employee involvement. It then defines employee involvement as an offshoot of early twentieth-century humanistic psychologies, from which it inherits an emancipatory ambition. In a third step, the article presents employee involvement as a set of organizational practices liable to transform dominant patterns of authority and social interaction in the workplace. The article concludes by contending that, apart from representation/participation and the employee’s voice, employee involvement must be considered the third necessary pillar of workplace democracy, endowed with distinctive normative features that neither representation/participation nor voices can aptly capture.

Keywords

workplace democracyemployee involvementvoicedemocratic theoryparticipatory management
Type
Article
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 360 - 385
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Business Ethics

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