This article examines some of the discussions and debates in the literature about workers' control and self-management, which have assumed an importance in the context of the search for an alternative to the prevailing global socioeconomic, political and cultural system and its persistent crises. The article reviews and analyses a range of…

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate how the Nordic model, featuring highly regulated trade union-employer collaboration, has enabled the building of learning organizations through a co-generative learning model involving both practitioners and action researchers. Design/methodology/approach: A literature search on the Nordic sociotechnical…

A growing body of research examines the role of elite networks, power, and race in the advocacy for market-based reforms and their ultimate effects on students, teachers, and communities of color. Yet, less research explores how such reforms interact with gender in the workplace, especially how policies such as school choice, competition, and…

In recent years, issues pertaining to graduate student union organizing have been at the center of several political battles and court cases. This attention is, at least in part, due to the growth of graduate student unions at a time when organized labor's influence is receding in other, more traditionally unionized sectors of the labor force. As…

Previous research suggests that higher incomes, safe workplaces, job security and healthcare access all contribute to favorable health. Reflecting the interest of economic and political sociologists in power relations and institutions, union membership has been linked with many such influences on health. Nevertheless, the potential relationship…

Throughout the twentieth century, middle-class progressives embraced visions of democracy rooted in their relatively privileged life experiences. Progressive educators developed pedagogies designed to nurture the individual voice within egalitarian classrooms, assuming that collective action in the public realm could be modeled on the relatively…

Why are America's public schools falling so short of the mark in educating the nation's children? Why are they organized in ineffective ways that fly in the face of common sense, to the point that it is virtually impossible to get even the worst teachers out of the classroom? And why, after more than a quarter century of costly education reform,…

School systems sometimes make promises they have no intention of keeping. Other times, they can deliver a world of opportunities to the neediest children. They may or may not want to listen to parents or even teachers, but school systems always attend to the demands of the most powerful individuals and institutions in their communities. For the…

The presence of a faculty union in a community college has a significant impact on its governance. This chapter offers recommendations for dealing with the challenges presented by collective bargaining in the postsecondary education environment.

"The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education" is the first authoritative reference work to provide an international analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge, education, and schooling. Rather than focusing solely on questions of how we teach efficiently and effectively, contributors to this volume push further…

The interwar decades saw a bitter recruiting war between the NUT (National Union of Teachers), the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT), and the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS), which like the NUWT broke away from the NUT in the early 1920s. The NAS opposed the NUT's official policy shift to support equal pay for male and female…

The Roma community of Europe continues to face discrimination in a number of areas, notably education, employment, healthcare, and housing. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, education provides one of the primary tools for escaping the cycle of poverty that traps many Roma families, and therefore it is one of the most pressing issues that…

Supported by the Carnegie Foundation and other allies, teacher unions are now demanding that teachers take over the nation's schools and run them without management interference. Teachers need "enablement" more than empowerment, as seen in the case of Rochester, New York. (MLH)

The Federal Republic of Germany has begun an experiment in industrial democracy giving workers federally guaranteed rights and authority in industrial decision making. All workers in companies with five or more employees are entitled to elect a works council with which management must consult concerning all employment policies and conditions. All…

Longitudinal survey research permits examination of the influence profiles of free-standing faculty senates and coexisting senates and faculty unions on U.S. college campuses. The forces prompting flow of power away from faculty deliberative bodies are discussed and the future of senates in hard times is examined. (MSE)