Industrial Self-Management and Political Attitudes

The purpose of this article is to test the widely shared view that the experience of industrial democracy, the experience of direct decision making at places of work, necessarily leads to the enhancement of cooperative and egalitarian orientations among participants. Based on data collected through indepth interviews and questionnaires in Pacific-Northwest plywood cooperatives, the article argues that in market societies, such experiments in industrial democracy do not have the hypothesized results. Indeed, they seem to encourage the development of values most closely identified with classical liberalism or what MacPherson terms “possessive individualism.â€