This book provides a critical insight into the ongoing debates and controversies that surround employee empowerment and workplace innovation. It highlights competing interests and conflicting values, and illuminates some basic tensions between confident rhetoric and everyday realities.

Martin Beirne's contribution marks a contrast with established academic investigations in this area. It combines sober analysis with advocacy to claim space for a research-based activism among coalitions of critical researchers and like-minded practitioners that can anticipate and promote genuinely enriching and empowering ways of managing and organizing work.

Advanced students of management and organization will discover an invaluable, thought-provoking resource. It offers fresh insights, stimulating arguments and applied knowledge that will also appeal to managers with responsibility for work and employee relations, and to educators and researchers in the areas of critical management studies, work and employment.

Contents:
Foreword
Foreword to Empowerment and Innovation
1. Perspectives on Empowerment and Progressive Change at Work
Part I: Contemporary Developments
2. Progressive Teamworking: Disputes, Promise and Practicalities
3. Technology and User Empowerment
4. Financial Participation
5. Gender and Empowerment
6. Culture, Management and Innovation
Part II: Enabling, Enacting and Regulating
7. Sustaining a Voluntary Commitment
8. Public Policy and Regulatory Initiatives
References
Index

About the Author
Martin Beirne, Formerly Professor of Management and Organisational Behaviour, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK

Reviews
'This book provides insight into the ongoing controversies revolving around employee empowerment and workplace innovation, it discusses common tensions between confident rhetoric and daily realities, and it provides an in-depth analysis of employee interpretations and reactions, the culture and structure of struggle and management, and much more. College-level audiences will find this no casual read, but an in-depth survey that covers all the basic conflicts of politics and rhetoric with an analysis of how it operates in the workplace.'
--Midwest Book Review



Book Information
ISBN 9781782548355
Author Martin Beirne
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd
Publisher Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd