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

production processes and product development areas, the transparency
of company operation increases and workers become better placed to
participate in business decision-making. Therefore, one solution may
be to establish a closer connection between business results and workers’
involvement. Such a system, for example, is the open book management
system (Case, 1998) which has lately become popular in the
US. Under this system, workers are given detailed cash flow information,
and over time develop a remuneration system which links the
individual or team contribution to cash flow. This is one form of profit
sharing, but it is also very close to the original intention of the selfmanagement
system in the former Yugoslavia.
The second solution may lie in the fact that people will become
motivated out of self-interest to acquire skills such as team work, cross
department collaboration, multiple technical skills and so on, which
are characteristic of firms with a quality based management, even
when they do not expect that they will work permanently in such a
company. The reason is that world class companies will increasingly
expect these skills from newcomers and even temporary workers.
Cooperative skills can become a basic requirement for being hired. We
can foresee the situation where workplaces, as a result, will be much
more cooperative and democratic than they are today. This development,
we should stress, will come as a result of collective learning from
world class companies and not from political or academic sources.
7.5 Conclusion
Tea Petrin and Alesa Vahcaica 113
There is no simple model of the organization of the firm that can
describe the complexity of rapidly changing production modes.
Coexistence of solutions, depending on branch, technology, culture,
habits and so forth, will prevail. The view of the firm as a collective of
homogeneous individuals, with equal interests in the long-term survival
of the firm, is no longer valid. Governments are gradually abandoning
the full responsibility for the social security of people and,
increasingly, individuals and their families have to take responsibility
for their income and wealth. We are witnessing not only the globalization
of firms but also the globalization of individual/family income
sources and wealth. Therefore, loyalty to one firm, which is an implicit
assumption of the self-management model, is increasingly becoming
questionable. Also, with new trends of models of systems integration
(Best, 1997), people are increasingly required to understand what other
firms are doing, in greater detail.