Includes bibliographical references and index. Beirne, M. (2013). Rhetoric and the politics of workplace innovation: Struggling with empowerment and modernization. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Perspectives on empowerment and progressive change at work -- Challenging the old orthodoxy? -- Locating the power in empowerment -- Part I: Contemporary Developments -- Progressive teamworking: disputes, promise and practicalities -- Challenging the status quo -- Politics and contradictions -- Technology and user empowerment -- Towards a radical agenda -- Structures and struggles -- Financial participation -- Deja vu with rhetoric and evidence: another deficit? -- The evidence on employee schemes -- Gender and empowerment -- Explaining gender inequality -- Action, at the workplace and beyond -- Culture, management and innovation -- Prescriptions for cultural change -- Critical evaluations -- Culture, structure and arenas of struggle -- Part II: Enabling, Enacting and Regulating -- Sustaining a voluntary commitment -- Critical commentaries and progressive images of management -- Connecting art with management -- No method, no guru, no illusions -- Public policy and regulatory initiatives -- National initiatives -- The role of the European Union -- Beyond 'soft law' politics

This book provides a critical insight into the ongoing debates and controversies that surround employee empowerment and workplace innovation. It highlights competing interests and conflicting values, and illuminates some basic tensions between confident rhetoric and everyday realities. Martin Beirne's contribution marks a contrast with established academic investigations in this area. It combines sober analysis with advocacy to claim space for a research-based activism among coalitions of critical researchers and like-minded practitioners that can anticipate and promote genuinely enriching and empowering ways of managing and organizing work. Advanced students of management and organization will discover an invaluable, thought-provoking resource. It offers fresh insights, stimulating arguments and applied knowledge that will also appeal to managers with responsibility for work and employee relations, and to educators and researchers in the areas of critical management studies, work and employment.