Participation Programs in Work Organizations: Past, Present, and Scenarios for the Future. .(Book Review)

A.Bar-Haim. Participation Programs in Work Organizations: Past, Present, and Scenarios for the Future. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002, 178 pages, $54.95.

Psychologists have been emphasizing participation in organizations for many decades. It is fair to say that the consensus of the field would be that, most of the time, employee participation in decision making is better than no participation. It is also fair to say that this same consensus has also been reached in the fields of organizational behavior, human resources, industrial sociology, and, possibly, economics. With so much agreement, the reader could ask "Why another book on participation? What can it say that we don't already know?" My goal is to spend the rest of this review showing that this particular book is a valuable contribution, and, although it is primarily a review of well known and well documented programs from the past half century, it does help us see what we already know in a different light.

Bar-Haim is in a good position to provide a different perspective. First, he is an industrial sociologist, writing and analyzing with a different skew than we 1-0 psychologists, …