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Long-term health conditions are a significant occupational and global burden and can undermine people's ability to work. Workplace support for self-management of long-term conditions has the potential to minimise adverse work effects, by enhancing health and work outcomes. No data exist about employers' views concerning supporting workers with long-term conditions to self-manage.

The exploration of employers' views involved recruiting 15 participants with responsibilities for workplace health, well-being and safety responsibilities, who participated in a semi-structured interview about self-management and support. Data were analysed using a qualitative six-stage thematic analysis technique.

Self-management support is not purposely provided to workers with long-term conditions. Support in any form rests on workers disclosing a condition and on their relationship with their line-manager. While employers have considerable control over people's ability to self-manage, they consider that workers are responsible for self-management at work. Stigma, work demands and line-manager behaviours are potential obstacles to workers' self-management and support.

Workplace discussions about self-managing long-term conditions at work should be encouraged and opened up, to improve health and work outcomes and aligned with return-to-work and rehabilitation approaches. A wider biopsychosocial culture could help ensure workplaces are regarded as settings in which long-term conditions can be self-managed.

This study highlights that employer self-management support is not provided to workers with long-term conditions in a purposeful way. Workplace support depends on an employer knowing what needs to be supported which, in turn, depends on aspects of disclosure, stigma, work demands and line management.

The Polish tradition of worker participation in the management of the enterprise dates back to 1918–1919. This tradition found its roots in the influence of the October Revolution in Russia, and independence activities in Poland, the councils of workers' delegates and factory committees. The task of the workers' delegates and factory committees was to organise workers, to insure the protection of their professional and living interests and to reopen and supervise factories left behind by invaders.

Under Josip Tito’s leadership, Yugoslavia broke away from Stalinistic central planning in 1948 and developed an economy‐wide system of worker self‐management. Its ideological focus was on leadership development and continuous learning among all employees, replacing owners and state bureaucracy with empowered workers at the helm of Yugoslav firms. Over time, the world’s largest experiment in empowerment went awry, however. A state‐supported neo‐Taylorism with a “thinking tank” and a separate “working tank,” evolved which represented little real empowerment. By the 1980s, self‐management had become an impotent bureaucratic formality behind a democratic facade. The dynamics within the rise and fall of Yugoslav self‐management provide lessons for understanding and managing empowerment efforts today.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

Since the post‐Stalin thaw of the mid‐1950s, economic reform has been a constant theme in academic discussion and policy implementation in the countries of Eastern Europe. In Poland, major reform programmes accompanied the five‐year plans beginning in 1956, 1966, and 1969. The current economic crisis in that country has elicited yet another set of reform proposals.

A detailed account is given of a strike during December 1987 in a number of production and support units of the Ravne Iron Works, located in Slovenia, and run under workers′ self‐management, according to the laws in force at that time. The phenomenon of the strike is initially examined in the context of the official political and legal refusal to recognize its existence. A discussion then follows on how, within the then national model of workers′ self‐management, strikers were acting against their own agents (management) and against their own economic and political interests. A scrutiny of management′s role shows how its response frequently was to concede strikers′ demands, for reasons of avoiding official attention and opprobrium. The strike thus acquired a reputation for being antisocial, unacknowledged, yet effective. Finally, the strike events are analysed in respect of the economic, sociological, political and epidemiological models of strikes: elements of all four models are identified.

Job search behavior is an important factor of an individual's career. In this study, proactive individuals' search for career opportunities during the transition from unemployment to employment is investigated. This investigation concentrates on the “in-between jobs” phase to better understand career transition. Proactive coping is a particularly important aspect of the transition from unemployment to work.

Using the career self-management model and proactive coping theory, this paper establishes a conceptual model and adopts path analysis to examine the model with a sample of 208 unemployed workers from Poland.

The results indicate both direct and indirect effects for proactive coping on job-seeking behavior. Unemployed job seekers, with greater proactive coping, intensify their job search behavior and increase their chances for re-employment.

Proactive coping is an important factor in career development. The findings of this study are a promising starting point for career self-development training for unemployed workers in transition.

Most of the training for the unemployed prepares them to react and adapt to ongoing circumstances. Our findings show the importance of being proactive during active coping with unemployment.

This article describes the practical and theoretical implications relating to the labor managed firm (LMF), which has been formed from an insolvent company purchased by its workers. The research focuses on an international comparison and the cultural context of six LMFs – two each in the United States, Spain, and Italy where legislation supports worker buyouts from insolvency. Adopting a critical theoretical approach it draws on the scholarship of industrial relations and human resource management, grounded in a historical analysis to predict when a transformative or integrative LMF will be formed.

Taking a case study methodology to enable an in-depth understanding of the firms internal processes and relationships the use of semi-structured interviews of blue- and white-collar workers (with the use of a translator) and the administration of a structured questionnaire are used to gather and triangulate qualitative and quantitative data. The research limitations relate to the small number of respondents in each firm, which prevented more rigorous analysis, and calls for further research with larger numbers of respondents.

The results reveal that at macro level the theoretical model predicts that the LMF will have a propensity to emerge when there are market failures, when there is support from the state and the labor movement. The type of LMF was found to depend on the national context of industrial relations. At the micro level a core set of practices were found to work together to lead to high member commitment and positive behavioral outcomes.

The research has important social implications by informing public policy aimed at redressing the injustice to employees when a business fails and jobs and entitlements are lost.

The article advances an understanding of the theoretical nature of the LMF.

The question of responsibility for career development is critical for virtual employees who work remotely. The purpose of this paper is to (1) compare the perceptions of virtual and on-location employees in the high-tech industry about where responsibility lies for career management, as reflected in their psychological contract (PC) and (2) evaluate the ability of virtual employees to exercise behaviors capable of enhancing their career development.

A mixed-methods approach was used for this study. Study 1 consisted of semi-structured interviews (N = 40) with virtual and on-location employees working for the same high-tech organization, exploring perceptions responsibility for career self-management as captured by their PCs. Study 2, a quantitative survey of virtual and on-location employees (N = 146) working for various organizations in the high-tech sector, examined perceptions of career self-management through the perceived PC, as well as the perceived ability to exercise behaviors that would enhance career development.

Both categories of employees assumed that they, together with their direct manager, had responsibility for managing their career development. Nevertheless, virtual employees had lower expectations of support from their managers in this respect (Study 1) and felt that they actually received less support from their managers (Study 2). The results of both studies show, however, that virtuality does not have any significant effect on employees’ self-reported proactive career-influencing behaviors.

The study contributes to existing research by highlighting the perceived joint responsibility for career management and the critical role played by line management in this regard and by showing that virtuality does not have a significant effect on employees’ self-reported proactive career-influencing behaviors.

The development of human society and of culture shows that changes in society and social relations have not always been followed by changes of the same intensity in education. If education lags behind the social changes in a greater measure, then the “crises” in education are deeper and social intervention is more necessary. However much we may try to regard changes in education individually, they are in the final instance a reflection of the state and changes in society, because instruction and education are a part of social labour. They are a function of society and appear as one of the moving forces of its development, or, on the contrary, as a factor of maintaining outgrown relations. Therefore, the character of instruction and education is determined by the goals which society puts before them. The conclusion derived from this is that changes in education, in its system and organisation cannot be successfully carried out independently from changes which occur in society.