‘PARTICIPATION WORLD-WIDE’

Catholic University of Brussels, Belgium
4–6 July 2002

Conference themes

The bi-annual IAFEP conferences provide an international forum for the presentation and debate of current research and scholarship on the economics of participation. The major themes of the 2002 conference will be:

• Development and combination of forms of workers’ participation around the world
• Theoretical and empirical studies on the economic and social effects of participation
• Workers’ participation across borders, in a transnational and global context
• Employee participation and EU enlargement
• Employee ownership in transition economies
• Workers’ participation and social economy in developing countries
• Workers’ participation, social dialogue and civil society

Presentations in the following areas are welcome:

• Co-determination, works councils, European works councils
• Other forms of workers’ participation in decision-making
• Employee ownership
• Self-management, labour-managed firms
• Cooperatives
• Profit sharing
• Economic and industrial democracy
• Social enterprises in welfare services

Outline

Forms of workers’ participation are expanding all over the world, and thus seem to have a role in the highly competitive global economy.

In the United States, thousands of companies have promoted forms of employee share-ownership and profit-sharing as part of a competitive management policy. In the European Union, workers’ participation has become a basic element of the European Social Model, with the promotion of various participatory forms –such as information and consultation, financial participation, and workers’ involvement in decision-making– that are developing also in a transnational manner, as witnessed by the recent promotion of European Works Councils. Forms of self-management have been promoted in a number of countries, especially after having been encouraged in the privatisation process carried out by transition economies, in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and elsewhere. Workers’ participation has also been experienced by enterprises in several countries in Asia and South America, and different forms of it are also emerging in many African countries.

The aim of the Conference is to provide some assessment of workers’ participation as a world phenomenon, and to present new aspects, both theoretical and empirical, of its economic effects, economic performance, and new role in a global economy.

Specific emphasis will also be given to the combination of different forms of workers’ participation and their effectiveness, from both the economic and the social standpoints.

The Conference is also intended to identify how forms of workers’ participation can develop and evolve within a context of massive capital movements and internationalisation of economies.

While the first plenary session will be dedicated to workers’ participation in the European Union, and its prospects in an enlarged EU, the presentation of studies on workers’ participation experiences in other areas and countries of the world would be most welcome. We therefore issue a particular call to academics and practitioners working on countries for which as yet no significant research has been done in this area.

Call for papers
Submissions are invited from all relevant fields of study, including labour economics, comparative economic systems, industrial economics, organisational studies, management studies, economic sociology, institutional economics, evolutionary economics, development economics, and studies of economies in transition.

Abstract submission deadline

Proposals for papers to be presented at the conference should be sent electronically in the form of an abstract of up to 300 words. The deadline for receipt of the abstracts is 28 February 2002. They should include full details of institutional affiliation and a mailing address. Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 31 March. Final papers plus extended abstracts should be submitted to the organisers by 15 May 2002. Each paper should be no more than 8,000 words in length. The conference organisers will arrange for the reproduction and distribution of each paper before the conference.

Abstracts should be sent to the following e-mail:
Daniel.Vaughan-Whitehead@cec.eu.int
They may also be sent to: Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead, Avenue du Pesage, 127,
B-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.

Young Scholars Prize on Workers' Participation

We have the pleasure to announce that the Prize for the best research work on the subject of the economics of participation will be delivered at the Conference. Applicants should be scholars/researchers under 32, having completed or finalising a PhD on workers' participation, either in economics or other related discipline.

As described above, the economics of participation overlap with several fields such as labour, development, industrial relations, comparative economic systems, studies on transition. They include research on such topics as employee ownership, decision making participation, codetermination and works councils, labour managed firms, profit sharing and related topics.

The candidates will have to send a summary of their research work with accompanying article, report or book by the end of May.

Council of the IAFEP
Alberto Zevi, President of IAFEP (University of Rome, Italy), Daniel Vaughan- Whitehead, Vice-President of IAFEP (European Commission, Brussels), Will Bartlett (Bristol University, UK), Carlo Borzaga (University of Trento, Italy), Juan G. Espinosa (CIENES-OEA, Chile), Branko Horvat (University of Zagreb, Croatia), Derek Jones (Hamilton College, USA), Panu Kalmi (Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland), Gerard Kester (Global Participation Development Programme, The Netherlands), Virginie Perotin (University of Leeds, UK), Stephen C. Smith (George Washington University, USA), Milica Uvalic (University of Perugia, Italy), Jaroslav Vanek (Cornell University, USA).We kindly ask you to circulate the present announcement to other persons working on workers' participation who may be interested in participating in this event.