Employee participation in a itish oOtXI!non. OWnerShip firm is e the light of some of the major criticiams of workers' se1f-managemt. Thi'eG aspects of participation are isolated: employee involvement, the purposes of I involvement, arid, the control or influence exercised as a result of involvement. videnca on the nature and extent of participation is drawn from a study of the history of the first nine yeara of the common-ownership experiment, and from a field survey carried out in the firm at the end of te period. This evidence suggests that only a small minority of employees took an active part in the participative system of the organisa'tiori, that there was litti. unity of purpose amongst the nployees in their use of the system, aid that a relatively small degree of irifluenoe or control 'was exereised b,r employees over top mamagemente A model is outlined of the main factors hypothesised. to afjct involvement. These factors include employees' perceived needs, the perceived relevance of participative activities to the satisfaotioi of these needs, arid the perceived I costs of undertaking the activities in question. The low level of involvement identified in the firm studied is related. to a situation in which it appeare4 that the Imrticiative activities concerned were of united, relevance to many of the employees, and. that the participative system was likely to be seen as a 'high cost' one. Charges in the structure and leadership of the partic1pativ system are proposed to maxiuiise the relevance of involvement and mininise its costs, and. so provide the conditions for a more realistic exploration of the potential of self'management. Pinafly, an action research project is described which was carried out subsequently in the firm on the basis of this analysis. The findings of this project tend, to support the hypothesis advanced on tha factors effecting involvement. -

This thesis maps the education, training and employment experiences of fifty-four young adults in the South Wales Valleys. Over three years, at the turn of the twentieth century, it chronicled fifty-four school careers that led to no, or few qualifications; one hundred and twenty-three experiences of post-school learning programmes that had similarly poor outcomes; and one hundred and twenty-six jobs found and lost. The thesis looks at what happened to the young people through these experiences and uses their narratives to try and explore why it happened. Using theories of social and cultural capital it explores how, within a disadvantaged community, these young people are particularly disadvantaged. The study found that their experiences of education, training and employment promoted and reinforced a personal agency that prioritised the immediate over the planned, the tangible over the prospective and the known over the unknown. It also further embedded a localism that relied on social networks and shared cultural perspectives to provide support but that also confined them to an impoverished sub-section of the local labour market. The thesis concludes that learning can play a crucial role in securing a sustainable route out of poverty for these young people, and the forty children they had between them by the end of the study. However, to do so, the opportunities provided, and expectations of those providing them, will need considerable development. Learning has to find a way of working with, and not against, the cultural and social norms that have shaped these young people.

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In many countries, the extent to which immigration affects the labour market of the host economy is one of the key concerns in the public debate on immigration policies. Chapter 2 of this thesis provides a thorough review of the economic literature on the labour market impact of immigration and summarises the current empirical evidence. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of immigrants on the German labour market during the 1990s. This analysis takes advantage of a natural experiment in which a particular group of immigrants was exogenously allocated to specific regions across the country by the government. The empirical analysis focuses on the effect of these exogenous inflows on relative skill-specific employment and wage rates of the resident population. Chapter 4 of the thesis investigates how industries and firms respond to a change in the skill mix of local labour supply induced by an inflow of immigrants. One way to absorb these changes is an expansion in size of those industries and firms that use the corresponding skill group most intensively. Alternatively, in dustries and firms can adjust their production process and switch to a technology that uses the corresponding skill group more intensively. Based on German micro data, the analysis assesses which of these channels is dominant and quantifies their relative contributions. One of the key assumptions in many impact analyses is that natives and immigrants of the same observable skill level are perfect substitutes in the labour market and are thus equally affected by aggregate economic shocks. Chapter 5 of the thesis tests this assumption by analysing the way different immigrant groups in Germany and the UK respond to the economic cycle relative to comparable native workers.

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