For many years Emmanuel Lazega has explored communication behavior and decision-making processes of small workgroups within larger organizations. To account for the knowledge claims of members of those groups, and for the ways in which such claims are legitimated collectively and translated into action, he presents a theory of the interactive elaboration of information on which decisions are based.

This collection examines not only the enormous diversity of imeanings and forms of worker participation in the contemporary period but also its global character. The chapters cover Western and Eastern Europe, the United States and Japan, China, and the Third World. Each of them is informed in some way by the conviction that worker participation is an eminently political phenomenon- that it is about politics and power at the level of the workplace, and that the larger context of social, political, and economic power and organization shapes what happens to participation locally. In this sense, the volume is not simply about internal workplace reforms. Nor is it a country-by-country survey of laws and institutions, but rather a collection of substantive analyses of the actual dynamics of participation and change.

Employee voice in company strategic and governance decision-making in Anglophone countries commonly has few formal channels. This article's investigation of labour's (collective employees) interest expression in Australia and New Zealand finds that labour actors engage with company actors to craft a range of channels of expression and participation. In addition to actors' utilisation of formal institutional provisions for adversarial collective bargaining and cooperative participation, actors utilise other 'at the table' arrangements that are typically of low salience. These include non-formal, inter-actor arrangements that facilitate contribution to decisions that can include matters of strategic importance. Labour actors engage with company actors in intricate micro-political relations to contribute influence in framing understandings and horizons of decisions and norm-building. Their quiet activities contribute regulatory effect in company decision-making. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170211011340.

Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends, Volume 16 of Research in the Sociology of Work, offers cutting edge research on the character and implications of workplace participation. Written by some of the leading scholars in the sociology of workplace transformation and alternative organizations, the chapters here examine various outcomes, causes, and consequences related to participation programs and worker democracy today. Topics include ways in which participation schemes are socially constructed and negotiated; the meanings that workers attach to opportunities for involvement in the workplace; practice, participation, and consent in alternative organizations such as cooperatives and collectives; and theoretical treatments that call for new ways of thinking about workplace participation. Methodologically pluralist and concerned less with specific productivity effects of worker participation, this volume highlights the social structural, social constructionist, and meta theoretical dimensions of worker participation and democratic organizations in the twenty-first century. The global, 24/7 economy and the organizational changes it has generated have enormous implications for the organization, experience and use of time in (and out of) the workplace. In addition to eroding the boundary between home and work, creating time pressures both within and outside of the workplace, the need for businesses to compete in a 24/7 global economy has re-problematized time in the workplace. Drawing on sociology, labor economics, organizational behavior and social history, the papers in this volume examine either empirically or theoretically, a variety of aspects of time in the workplace. Contributors to this volume examine issues surrounding the distribution of and struggle over work hours and how these vary across a number of factors including race, class, occupation and other structural components of work. They examine temporal structures within organizations including inequities in flexible scheduling, entrainment and work teams, polychronicity, and how changing temporal structures affect professionalism and expertise. They also consider the way in which changing uses and organization of work time, in the context of economic instability and globalization, affect the difficulties of reconciling work and family. At the more micro-level, the papers consider individuals' perceptions and constructions and intersubjective constructions of time. To varying degrees, the authors speak to the policy implications or strategies for managing new times. Taken as a whole, these papers shed light on the way in which globalization and the emergence of a 24/7 economy have altered the ways, times, and meanings of time at work. Research in the Sociology of Work is now available online at ScienceDirect full-text online of volumes 10 onwards. *Examines various worker participation models and evaluates the success of their outcomes *Adopts a variety of methods and highlights the different dimensions of worker participation