Edinburgh Napier University

  Does it pay for firms to involve their workforce, or is such participation an expensive luxury? For those who would like to see increased employee participation and representation, this is a key issue. What, though, would be the mechanisms through which
such practices would pay? One possibility lies in the relationship between participation and representation on the one hand, and labour ‘flexibility’ on the other. It has become fashionable to argue that to achieve economic success, whether at the corporate or national level, flexibility is of key importance. While this term ‘flexibility’ is often used, it is rarely defined. In related work (Michie and Sheehan, 1999) we have made a distinction between the positive and negative types of policies and practices that are encompassed within the overall term ‘flexibility’. In this paper we look specifically at the role of worker participation and representation in the workplace. To do so we use the UK’s 1990 Workplace and Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS3). We investigate the relationship between firms' human resource management practices - with a particular focus on employee participation and representation mechanisms - on the one hand and the firms’ levels of research and development (R&D) expenditure and the probability of their introducing innovative investment on the other