Rhetoric and the Politics of Workplace Innovation Struggling with Empowerment and Modernization

This book provides a critical insight into the ongoing debates and controversies that surround employee empowerment and workplace innovation. It highlights competing interests and conflicting values, and illuminates some basic tensions between confident rhetoric and everyday realities. Martin Beirne's contribution marks a contrast with established academic investigations in this area. It combines sober analysis with advocacy to claim space for a research-based activism among coalitions of critical researchers and like-minded practitioners that can anticipate and promote genuinely enriching and empowering ways of managing and organizing work. Advanced students of management and organization will discover an invaluable, thought-provoking resource. It offers fresh insights, stimulating arguments and applied knowledge that will also appeal to managers with responsibility for work and employee relations, and to educators and researchers in the areas of critical management studies, work and employment. Contents: Foreword Foreword to Empowerment and Innovation 1. Perspectives on Empowerment and Progressive Change at Work Part I: Contemporary Developments 2. Progressive Teamworking: Disputes, Promise and Practicalities 3. Technology and User Empowerment 4. Financial Participation 5. Gender and Empowerment 6. Culture, Management and Innovation Part II: Enabling, Enacting and Regulating 7. Sustaining a Voluntary Commitment 8. Public Policy and Regulatory Initiatives References Index