Tom Schuller

Forms of Ownership and Control: Decision-Making within a Financial Institution

Recent literature suggests that control of corporations has shifted from individual capitalists to financial institutions. The article, based on original research, examines the relationship between ownership and control in relation to one set of financial institutions, namely pension funds. Focusing particularly on the role of employee representatives on trustee boards of pension schemes, the authors first suggest that the notion of ownership is even less clearcut in the case of pension funds than it is for public corporations. Recognition of pensions as deferred pay implies that the funds should belong to the scheme members, but ownership rights are severely circumscribed. Turning to the control issue, the authors report first on the recent increase in employee representation; they look at the content of decision-making, focusing specifically on three areas: investment, information and the selection of professional staff; and then examine the structure of decision-making, looking both at institutional features (e.g. the relation between participation and collective bargaining) and financial practices. They conclude by stressing the diversity of types of influence exercised, suggesting the presence of complex and multiple relationships between ownership and control.

Common Discourse? The Language of Industrial Democracy

Greater educational equality can help to redress the unequal distribution of power at the workplace. But the provision of expanded educational opportunity for new participants in the industrial decision-making process poses a challenge to the interests which currently determine the content and distribution of knowledge and skills. It entails the evolution of new concepts and therefore changes in the language of industrial government. Yet the determination of a qualitatively different form of education as an alternative to the dominant ideology contains its own tensions and even contradictions. Particular problems arise in connection with the role of education as a stimulator of aspirations, with the notion of collective learning, and with the relation between learners and those who determine what is learnt. All these combine to accentuate the difficulty of defining the content, character and institutional framework of education for industrial democracy.

Convenors as Parents, Branches as Homes: influences on adult learning

Researchers have approached the issue from a variety of perspectives. Some have focused closely on the educational institutions and the attitudes of those who people and control them. Teachers have been criticised for the way their values discriminate against working-class children (e.g. Keddie, 1971), or for ignoring the needs and claims of girls (Spender, 1982). Similarly, the school curriculum has been analysed in terms of its systematic reflection of middle-class values, and for its bias against ethnic minorities (Bernstein, 1973; Searle, 1973). Other studies have paid more attention to circumstances and actions outside the classroom. These include

Union Representatives and their Members: Learning and Communication

The article reports on research conducted in 7 Scottish workplaces on the way shop stewards learn to carry out their representative duties, in particular how they communicate with the members they represent. Formal training is seen as only one element in the learning process, to be analysed in the context of the stewards overall environment: the national union, the branch and the workplace. The pattern of communication between stewards and their members, management and other union office-holders is traced out by the use of diaries and the key role (positive and negative) of the convenor or senior steward described. Finally, a provisional framework is put forward for the evaluation of formal training, and results reported from its application.