It has long been recognised that one of the most important features of a production technology lies in its implications for managerial control over the production process. Amongst early writers, Charles Babbage observed : "One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check...

West Germany's recovery and growth to a position of economic leadership over most other industrialized nations appears to have been achieved without the aid of widespread merger activity, at least up to the late nineteen-sixties. Although the official statistics understate the true number of...

Merger activity in West Germany remained at a low level in comparison with most industrialized countries until the late nineteen-sixties, but has increased very rapidly since then. Mergers notified to the Federal Cartel Office under section 23 of the 1958 Act Against Restraint of Competition...

The organization of productive activity within firms has received increasing attention in recent years. Problems of motivation, productivity and "quality of working life" have become central concerns at both policy and academic levels (Hackman and Suttle, 1977). Co-determination and worker...

Somewhere between traditional entrepreneurial firms and worker-cooperatives on the spectrum of alternative firm types lie a range of industrial partnership models, involving varying degrees of worker participation in decision-making and/or profit-sharing. In West Germany there are known to be...

Since the pioneering study of Harberger, monopoly welfare loss has received much attention in the literature. However, no attempt has been made explicitly to incorporate oligopolistic interaction. In this paper we postulate a specific social welfare function and solve directly for the level of...

Multidivisional firms account for a clear majority of the hundred leading companies in America and Britain, and significant proportions elsewhere in continental Europe. Thus a sizeable proportion of total economic activity in Western, developed economies now takes place within the...

Research suggests that there are potential mutual gains to be had from participatory production, yet traditional non-participatory organisation remains the norm in Western economies, and participatory 'alternatives' constitute a deviation. The paper argues that this apparent non-realisation of...

Empirical research on self-managed and participatory firms faces a major difficulty over the measurement of the key, participation variable. Indicators such as the proportion of workers belonging to a cooperative workers' financial stakes in the firm, the existence of a Works Council, the number...

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'...