Developing positive employment relations : international experiences of labour-management partnership edited by Stewart Johnstone, Adrian Wilkinson

Ideas of employee participation and voice have a long history as part of the search for good employment relations and have also attracted extensive interest among human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations researchers. In practice, participation can refer to a wide range of approaches and techniques, ranging from, on the one end, direct employee involvement initiatives such as profit-sharing, quality circles and communication techniques to giving workers ownership and control of organisations on the other (Wilkinson et al. 2010, 2014a). In between these two extremes is the pluralist idea of representative participation, where the central assumption is that differences of interest will inevitably arise in organisations and that effective employee representation is important in attempting to reconcile different interests (Johnstone and Ackers 2015). Historically, collective employee representation would normally be provided by independent trade unions through collective bargaining and joint regulation of the employment relationship.