Understanding the complex dynamics involved in workplace disputes helps improve the way organizations deal with unwelcome but inevitable occurrences. These issues have been researched from different perspectives, but previously such research has failed to ask how flattened organizational form might impact ways of resolving disputes, focusing instead on what occurs in conventional, hierarchical organizations only. In Co-operative Workplace Dispute Resolution, Elizabeth Hoffmann considers the question of how workplace disputes are raised in the absence of formal hierarchy. In contrast to conventionally organized businesses, co-operatives attempt to evenly distribute power and ownership and encourage worker control through egalitarian ideologies, flattened management structures and greater information sharing. Like conventional businesses, though, they still pursue goals relating to profit and efficiency. Dr Hoffmann argues that lessening hierarchy and sharing power, as occurs in co-operatives, provides insight into how greater worker involvement and ownership might operate in a less extreme and more modest form in conventional mainstream business. This book focuses on dispute resolution strategies at matched pairs of worker co-operatives and conventional businesses in three very different industries: coal mining, taxicab driving, and wholefood distribution. The author’s central finding is that the worker co-operative members have access to more dispute resolution strategies than their conventionally employed counterparts. This leads to the conclusion that benefits might be achieved by conventional businesses that wish to embrace specific attributes usually associated with co-operatives, including management-employee cooperation, shared ownership, or greater workplace equality.

Understanding the complex dynamics involved in workplace disputes helps improve the way organizations deal with unwelcome but inevitable occurrences. These issues have been researched from different perspectives, but previously such research has failed to ask how flattened organizational form might impact ways of resolving disputes, focusing instead on what occurs in conventional, hierarchical organizations only. In Co-operative Workplace Dispute Resolution, Elizabeth Hoffmann considers the question of how workplace disputes are raised in the absence of formal hierarchy. In contrast to conventionally organized businesses, co-operatives attempt to evenly distribute power and ownership and encourage worker control through egalitarian ideologies, flattened management structures and greater information sharing. Like conventional businesses, though, they still pursue goals relating to profit and efficiency. Dr Hoffmann argues that lessening hierarchy and sharing power, as occurs in co-operatives, provides insight into how greater worker involvement and ownership might operate in a less extreme and more modest form in conventional mainstream business. This book focuses on dispute resolution strategies at matched pairs of worker co-operatives and conventional businesses in three very different industries: coal mining, taxicab driving, and wholefood distribution. The author’s central finding is that the worker co-operative members have access to more dispute resolution strategies than their conventionally employed counterparts. This leads to the conclusion that benefits might be achieved by conventional businesses that wish to embrace specific attributes usually associated with co-operatives, including management-employee cooperation, shared ownership, or greater workplace equality.

Dispute management in the U.S. currently accepts workplace conflicts as a necessary part of organizational life. Having an effective dispute management system means providing the methods to resolve a dispute that matches the type and stage to which it has progressed while also serving the needs of those who use the system. Contributors to this collection provide a variety of viewpoints, including international perspectives, that help explain why employers who are committed to effective dispute management will use a combination of preventive and remedial dispute resolution mechanisms to address conflicts based primarily on interests, rights, or power. Several essays also investigate how the interpersonal nature of a relationship between people determines the method selected to handle disputes, the impact of the lens of gender on our thinking about negotiation as a social activity for problem solving, and the tension between self-interest and fairness in negotiation and the use of justifications and impression management to resolve this tension.

Volume 22 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations focuses on new approaches to managing resolving workplace disputes and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) from both theoretical and empirical perspectives and includes contributions from leading international scholars, including J. Ryan Lamare, William K Roche and Paul L. Latreille.

Identifies selected sources of information and assistance that will aid Federal agencies and unions representing governmental employees in developing a cooperative program. Identifies materials related to public sector experiences and includes other resources considered to be particularly useful to agency and union representatives. Covers: starting a labor-management cooperation effort; training and assistance; questions and answers; an annotated bibliography covering articles, books and reports, and video tapes. Valuable appendices!