'Everybody's talking at me': the dynamics of information disclosure and consultation in high-skill workplaces in the UK

The principles and practice of employee participation have been subject to an immense amount of interest from academics in recent years, much of it seeking to establish (or refute) proposed links between participation processes and better organisational governance and performance. There exists a lesser quantity of research on the dynamics of certain forms of employee participation at the workplace level. Whilst there are many published studies in the critical labour process tradition governing employees' task participation in micro-organisational forms such as teamworking, the same cannot be said for case study analysis of employee experience of both direct and indirect (representative) consultation practices. This paper addresses this gap by providing case study analysis of professional employees' evaluations and aspirations governing direct and indirect consultation processes at three high skill organisations based in engineering, finance and government-owned scientific research