This book aims to systematically assess laws and practices, close gaps that currently prevent a full profiling of financial participation, provide a description of individual countries against the background of comparable scores for the EU 27 and to promote a common platform for financial participation within the European Union.

Context is increasingly recognised as a critical explanatory variable in accounting for commonalities and differences in human resource management. Giving expression to it in research models holds the prospect of enhancing theory development, deepening our appreciation of embedded practices in diverse territories, and opening up new lines of enquiry. However, contextualisation presents a significant research challenge and increasingly, international academic research networks that bring together scholars from different countries in the co-production of knowledge represent a key approach to rising to this challenge. This volume documents aspects of the development of one such network, namely the Cranet Network on International Human Resource Management, and presents a series of recent contributions from the network. The chapters highlight, inter alia, the limits to convergence in human resource management as a result of contextual determinism, the role of institutional actors, markets, and work regulation in accounting for variations in practices, the contextual specificities and dynamics at play in transition economies, along with key methodological challenges that arise when seeking to build cumulative comparative knowledge via network collaborations of this nature. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of International Studies of Management & Organization.

The eighteen essays in this volume concentrate on the issues surrounding workers' participation, the area of industrial relations uppermost in Marco Biagi's thinking at the time of his assassination in March 2002. The trend toward ever greater employee involvement in managerial decisionmaking has been growing in Europe for over a decade, to a significant extent as a result of Biagi's work. From the start, he clearly discerned that the key to quality of work was worker participation. This book stands not merely as a homage, but as evidence that Biagi's assassination will not affect the progress he was making. In what amounts to an integrated series of recommendations for further European legislation on workers' participation in industrial relations, the authors analyse and evaluate the following: experience gained from implementation of the European Works Council Directive and the European Company Statute Directive; implications of the new Directive on Information/Consultation in National Undertakings and of the European Forum on the Financial Participation of Workers; and experience in a variety of national contexts, including those of Japan, Italy, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Slovenia. In the final analysis, employee involvement--when it is a genuine commitment on the part of all stakeholders--is seen as a sharing of cultural values that successfully reconciles efficiency and social justice. Those who believe this is a goal worth achieving, for reasons both economic and social, will recognize in this book an immensely valuable contribution.

Employee share ownership is generally put forward as a method of strengthening social ties in the company and a tool for sharing the fruits of growth. The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted permanent financial damage to businesses and, unfortunately, forced them to consider worst-case-scenarios to mop up liquidity problems. In order to reduce the social cost of the crisis to preserve jobs, companies are called upon to act in solidarity with their employees by promoting employee share ownership. Employee Share Ownership and Impacts on Organizational Value and Behavior gathers informational feedback on the practice of employee share ownership and its effects on the attitude and value of companies and its ability to alleviate the financial damage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Covering topics such as family firms, attitudinal effects, and quality of governance, this book provides an essential resource for employee ownership professionals, business managers, researchers, politicians, decision makers, cooperative businesses, business students, professors, researchers, and academicians.

This volume offers the insights of Baltic and Western European scholars into present socioeconomic, migration, identity, gender, race, media, and historical memory issues in the Baltic States. The book attempts to show the intensity and depth of social, economic and cultural change in the Baltic region. It throws light on why and how three small countries have become a litmus test case of modernity and its sensibilities, stretching from authoritarian and totalitarian past to liberal-democratic present. An historic jump from the Soviet Union to the European Union was accompanied by a dramatic struggle of the Baltic States for their inalienable right to return to the political map of the world. The Baltic States allow us a glimpse of the twentieth century history better than anything else. This interdisciplinary volume, by virtue of different perspectives employed by political scientists, gender and race scholars, communication and journalism researchers, linguists, and anthropologists will enable a readership to get the first-hand knowledge about an unprecedented social and political change that took place in the Baltic States over the past nineteen years. In addition, the book allows a point of departure into some historical memory clashes, controversies, and moral and political debates over the past and its impact on the present.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) assumed a prominent role in Central East Europe (CEE) early on in the transition process. Foreign investors were assigned the task of restructuring markets, providing capital and knowledge for investment in technologically outdated and financially ailing firms.

Unions face a once in a generation opportunity for renewal. Decades of decline have been compounded by a global elite who increasingly generate profit from financial engineering in ways that side-step labour and undermine the power of organised workers. However, as this economic system begins to falter, there are signs of a renewed union movement emerging. Debt-laden firms – from supermarkets and nursery chains to outsourcing giants – are collapsing, and workers are organising to determine what comes next. Unionised bank cashiers are refusing to push predatory loans, teachers are striking against the exploitative housing market, and manufacturing workers are pooling redundancy pay to buy-out plants and become worker owners. Alice Martin and Annie Quick argue that these are seeds of union renewal. To be effective in an age of finance, the union movement must set its ambitions beyond narrow wage-bargaining, and towards the financial systems that have infiltrated workplaces and impoverished communities. By doing so, they can play a critical role in ushering in a new, democratic economy. No-one committed to economic justice can afford to miss this urgent, highly original book and its radical vision for unions.

Decentralisation is changing the face of South East Europe. This book provides practical analysis of the devolutionary measures reshaping post-Communist economies. Using case studies from Croatia, the former Yugoslavia, Albania and more, this collection offers valuable insights into political and fiscal redistribution.

In 2001 Germany and Austria became the last EU states to lift transnational controls restricting access to their labour markets for citizens of ex-communist countries. This book challenges anti-immigration discourses to show that given the high percentage of skilled immigrants, it is the sending rather than the receiving countries who lose out.

This book, a second edition, has been significantly expanded and updated. It revisits the process of institutional change: its characteristics, determinants and implications for economic performance.