The Labor Managed Firm

This book uses economic theory to argue that worker-controlled firms are rare due to market failures rather than inherent organizational defects. The book will be of interest to scholarly researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in economics, especially in industrial organization, labor economics, comparative economics, organizational economics, and finance.

Monograph comprising an evaluation of workers self management experiences in Peru and Yugoslavia - discusses the solutions to macroeconomics problems such as unequal income distribution, decision making on capital investment, and labour productivity within self-managed firms, etc., and considers micro and macro economic theory relating to efficiency and competition. Graphs and references.

Monograph presenting an economic theory in support of a new economic system based on workers' self-management (workers participation) - covers the equilibrium of a competitive enterprise and changing market conditions, the decentralization of decision making, labour supply functions, economic policy problems, 'income sharing' (wages) and wage incentive, the allocation of economic resources, legal aspects and basic institutional forms of the labour-managed economy, etc. Diagrams and references.

Discusses the theory of labour-managed firms or producers' cooperatives, and of economies companies principally of such firms.

Table of contents

The articles in this volume offer stimulating research on the relationship among business cycles, participatory and labor-managed organizations, and employee voice. These contributions take various theoretical and empirical approaches and investigate many industries and countries, thus offering a balanced view on these current topics.

The historical relationship between capital and labor has evolved in the past few decades. One particularly noteworthy development is the rise of shared capitalism, a system in which workers have become partial owners of their firms and thus, in effect, both employees and stockholders. Profit sharing arrangements and gain-sharing bonuses, which tie compensation directly to a firm’s performance, also reflect this new attitude toward labor. Shared Capitalism at Work analyzes the effects of this trend on workers and firms. The contributors focus on four main areas: the fraction of firms that participate in shared capitalism programs in the United States and abroad, the factors that enable these firms to overcome classic free rider and risk problems, the effect of shared capitalism on firm performance, and the impact of shared capitalism on worker well-being. This volume provides essential studies for understanding the increasingly important role of shared capitalism in the modern workplace.