Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

7
Employee Involvement and the
Modern Firm*
Tea Petrin and Alesa Vahcaica
7.1 Introduction
In the early 1970s the topic of workers’ participation attracted great
attention among economists and also among other social scientists.
Undoubtedly, professor Horvat has been the leading economist who
devoted his rich scientific work to the development of the concept of
workers’ self-management in the Marxist tradition. He has also popularized
the concept among the Western and Eastern socialist economists
and has had a significant number of followers particularly among
his students. He presented his ideas in a large number of works published
in the West as well as in the East. Here we will refer mainly to
his seminal work The Political Economy of Socialism (Horvat, 1982).
With the fall of socialism it may seem that his work was lost. This,
however, is not the case. There are at least two reasons for that. First,
Professor Horvat stressed that certain conditions must be fulfilled for
the implementation of workers’ self-management: ‘(i) Long industrial
tradition … , (ii) Long tradition in political democracy … , (iii) High personal
incomes … , (iv) Short working week … , and (v) High level of
education … ’ (Horvat, 1982: 218). He stressed that the implementation
of self-management, due to the highly demanding set of factors, is possible
only in highly developed societies. This is obviously the old
Marxist conclusion that socialism can potentially be successfully introduced
in the most developed countries.
* This contribution is based on the paper presented at the 9th Conference of the
International Association for the Economics of Participation, Clifton Hill House,
University of Bristol, Bristol, 26–8 June 1998.
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