Participative management in Spanish large industrial companies: Degree of use, results obtained and international comparison (Spanish text)

During the last fifty years, a great number of studies have been published concerning the participative phenomenon. Furthermore, a considerable amount of companies has opted for introducing procedures that are aimed towards workers' participation. We have dedicated the first section of the work to introducing the terminology that will be used in this thesis, as well as to identifying companies' most common procedures. We will commence with those procedures that allow workers influencing decisions; this group comprises programs that are associated to participative management, industrial democracy and cooperativism. We will then describe available alternatives for reaching economical participation, differencing those connected to capital and those connected to added value. We will also assess the degree of use of these procedures. The last chapter of our theoretical review will deal with the identification of the results that can be obtained by workers' participation in decision-making processes.; The section dedicated to analysing fieldwork data will commence by describing participation programs used by Spanish companies. We will then describe the results obtained with their application. In order to do this, both subjective and objective means have been used. In the following section, we will summarise data concerning future tendencies of participation, and the sort of internal transformations taking place with their application. Once this has been made clear, we will continue with the relationships existing among participation programs and certain company characteristics, with the goal of identifying situations in which participative companies will most probably be found. Last, we will compare Spanish situation with that of large companies in the United States.