This volume includes theoretical and empirical research into changing institutions and employee participation. Topics covered in this title include: the experience with employee ownership in relation to the fast change of institutions in transitional countries including those in Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, and China; the influence of the specific institutional setting on development; e.g. for the Mondragon Group of coops or the Italian Cooperative Associations, development as affected both by the institutional structure within the group and the surrounding institutions; and, the influence of legislation in different countries of conditions for the development of different types of employee participation. It includes: the re-shaping of the role of the employees as company stakeholders and the impact of these changes on employee motivation, effort and productivity; the impact of new employee incentive schemes, reward structures or other incentive mechanisms (if any) on firm productivity and financial performance; evidence of the implementation and effects of the 'employee share-ownership education'; and, the impact of different informal institutions (culture) on the development and performance of different forms of employee participation.

This volume of Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms consists of ten original papers. The first five papers address the effects of institutions of governance (at the workplace and corporate levels), including new forms of workplace governance (e.g., self-directed teams), a traditional form (or trade unions) and financial participation schemes. The subsequent three papers turn to the issues of the determinants of the incidence of such institutions, followed by two theoretical contributions.

The paper by Tor Eriksson introduces a new survey of participatory employment practices in Danish firms, and connects these practices to productivity gains for the firm and wage gain for workers.

Jos?? Alberto Bayo-Moriones, Pedro Javier Galilea-Salvatierra, and Javier Merino-D??az de Cerio introduce a new telephone survey of participatory employment practices in 965 manufacturing establishments in Spain, and investigate whether these practices lead to gains for the firm and workers.

While the above two papers focus on new institutions of workplace governance, the next paper studies a traditional institution of workplace governance, i.e., trade unions. Chris Doucouliagos and Patrice Laroche conduct a meta-analysis of the effect of unions on productivity growth.

All three papers so far concentrate on non-financial aspects of governance. The next two papers tackle such financial aspects. The contribution by Agustin Ros is an empirical study of the effects of employee ownership on effort/shirking and horizontal monitoring based on rich survey data collected by the author on an employee owned firm and 6 comparable private firms.

The paper by Everaert and Hildebrandt contributes to the literatures on transition economies and participatory firms by examining the determinants of the incidence of soft budget constraints (SBCs), in particular enterprise ownership structure (including different forms of private ownership).

The next three papers turn to the issues of the determinants of participation. Andrew Pendleton, Erik Poutsma, Jos Van Ommeren and Chris Brewster use a unique cross-national survey of financial participation schemes in 2,506 establishments in 14 EU countries, and try to study the determinants of the adoption of such schemes.

Christopher Adams uses rich data on 1,153 product line workers in 162 British private sector manufacturing establishments to examine the use of group incentives (profit sharing or employee share ownership) and worker participation in decision making (specifically over the range of tasks performed).

The paper by Nicholas Wilson, Hao Zhang, and Andrew Robinson is an empirical study that examines hypotheses arising from a transaction cost economics (TCE) framework to explain employee share ownership.

The last two papers are theoretical contributions. Jan Erik Askildsen and Norman Ireland carefully develop a model of bargaining by a union and a firm over future benefits (e.g., a defined benefit pension) when workers may not receive these benefits either because the firm goes out of business before the benefit is to be paid or the worker leaves the firm before the benefit is vested.

In his paper "Comparative Systems, Destructive Trade and World Distributive Justice," one of the pioneers on the broad field of participatory and labor managedfirms, Jaroslav Vanek, extends earlier work by presenting an analysis of the impact of international trade in today's globalized economy.

This volume gathers recent insights into the determinants, developments and outcomes of employee share ownership. It focuses on a number of new emerging themes in the literature and tests some of the relationships using several, notable European datasets. The authors discuss employee share ownership from the perspective of strategic human resource management (SHRM) and present the 'contextual SHRM model,' where employee ownership is influenced by several environmental pressures, which indicated the need for five specific 'fits' of employee ownership. These fits are: fit of employee ownership with strategy of the firm, with the organizational cultural heritage, with the wider social cultural environment; fit with other HRM practices (internal fit); fit with personal characteristics of employees. The authors explore these fits with several new emerging theories and demonstrate what firms that want employee ownership to be an effective HRM policy need to do.

With the financial crisis and Great Recession, some economists have begun to question the orthodox approach to production and capital/labor relations over the last two to three decades. This orthodoxy has been thrown into question due to concerns of poor corporate decision-making, corporate capture of regulators, perceived rewards for failure, and uneven productivity growth. But a new spirit of introspection and doubt about orthodox approaches has created some impetus leading to greater interest in themes, such as worker ownership, sharing rewards, co-operatives, and employee involvement practices which feature heavily in the "Advances" series. This "new spirit" is apparent for all to see in the 12 contributions to this volume of "Advances" which cover co-operatives; effects of worker participation on firm performance; the diffusion of high involvement management practices; and outcomes for workers (i.e., job satisfaction and wages).

This 12th edition of "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms" contains a stimulating collection of original papers spanning a wide variety of topics. Part 1 of the volume contains three papers on the subject of job design and organizational performance, covering the determinants of multiskilling from a theoretical perspective and also the empirical effect of multiskilling and teams on financial performance. Part 2 of the volume concerns compensation, worker attitudes, and productivity. Papers in this section cover the effect of rules and costs on employer-provided health insurance, majority ownership and executive compensation, worker attitudes towards different forms of employee ownership and variable pay, and an analysis of performance-related pay, unions, and productivity in Italy. Part 3 contains three studies of worker cooperatives and nonprofit organizations in Italy, Spain, and Uruguay. This volume concludes with a debate on free trade and the ecological effects of alternative socio-economic systems.

With a growing prominence of sophisticated econometric research in a much-expanded field of New Economics of Participation (NEP), it is of particular value to learn about real-world examples of participatory and labor-managed firms in the advanced market economies through extensive case studies. In this volume of Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms, the authors present such case studies. The real-world examples of participatory organizations described vividly in this volume will help researchers in NEP to design empirical strategies better, and to interpret their econometric results more sensibly. Furthermore, they will help policymakers and practitioners in their efforts to construct better public policy and design management practices.