Workers’ Participation in Management: Integration versus Cooptation or Segregation

The Israeli case of the Histadrut's workers’ participation scheme is assessed by the workplace elites of the plants that have introduced the program. The core element in the program is the establishment of Joint Management, composed of workers’ representatives (WR) and management delegates (MD) in some dozens of industrial, craft, and construction plants of the Histadrut. Homogeneity and uniqueness versus heterogeneity and assimilation in the assessment patterns of two participant elites (WR and MD) and one nonparticipant elite shop committee (UR) were used as analytical dimensions of three possible modes of inter-elite relations concerning the participation scheme: segregation, cooptation or integration.