Research ethics in an unethical world: the politics and morality of engaged research

This article explores ethical dilemmas in researching the world of work. Recent contributions to WES have highlighted challenges for engaged research. Based on the emancipatory epistemologies of Bourdieu, Gramsci and Burawoy, the authors examine moral challenges in workplace fieldwork, question the assumptions of mainstream ethics discourses and seek to identify an alternative approach. Instead of an ethics premised on a priori, universal precepts that treasures academic neutrality, this article recognises a morality that responds to the social context of research with participation and commitment. The reflection in this study is based on fieldwork conducted in the former Soviet Union. Transformation societies present challenges to participatory ethnography but simultaneously provide considerable opportunities for developing an ethics of truth. An approach that can guide engaged researchers through social conflict’s ‘messy’ reality should hinge on loyalty to the emancipation struggles of those engaged in it

Employee involvement in Ukrainian companies

This paper examines the hypothesis that the introduction of Western quality standards has brought some development of employee involvement in Ukrainian manufacturing and service companies and analyses the consequences for managements' use of the institutions of employee representation. The subject is pursued through eight case studies, four in a test and four in a control group. Quality developments were driven by top managers and not by human resource (HR) practitioners. In the test companies, managerial hierarchies were flattened and process orientations adopted; training was increased; communication was improved and in some cases teamwork was established. These developments were largely absent in the four control cases. The consequences for employee representative institutions are examined. In three cases, management revived the previously anachronistic 'Assembly of the Working Collective' as an employee involvement tool, thereby demonstrating a preference for picking workplace institutions 'off the path' for adaptation rather than either using unions or limiting involvement to non-institutional modes

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history