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Book Review: ‘The Politics of Management’

in Europe (IDE) group which has recently compared participation policies and practice in twelve countries. A chapter is also devoted to the discussion of three societal level experiments concerning organization and management in the Soviet Union, China and Yugoslavia. Partly due to the amount of enquiry it has evoked, the Yugoslav experiments in particular are judged to have yielded both theoretical and pragmatic insight in the field of organizational participation and democracy. In the final part, titled, 'Learning From Experiments', the question of the potential costs and benefits deriving from organizational experiments are discussed. The characteristics which typify different forms of experiment are reiterated in the light of the foregoing review, and a number of inferences drawn relating to the effective organization of experiments. Whilst no one 'best' approach is advocated, the author enjoins experimenters to have 'a healthy regard for the unplanned' and not to 'sacrifice instructiveness to experimental control' (page 159). Given the breadth of its title and sub-title, some readers may be surprised at the extent of concentration on experiments relating to employee participation, at the expense of other aspects of the management process. Nevertheless, in elaborating the argument that social scientists and others need to recognize the variety of forms which experiments can take, and that tightly controlled (and as a consequence, artificial) approaches can carry considerable costs in terms of valid insights, this book is a worthwhile contribution to the literature. For the reviewer, it further underlined the value of cross-disciplinary cooperation between organizational sociologists and psychologists in the study of the workplace.