Participation and Partnership in the UK: Progress and Prospects

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of participation and partnership in the institutional context of the UK. The central argument is that while partnership at work only became government policy in 1997 as part of New Labour‘s attempt to ‘modernise’ employment relations (Martinez-Lucio and Stuart 2005), partnership builds upon a long history of experiments and policies concerning employee participation. However, identifying the antecedents of partnership depends very much upon how we define the concept. If we use loose definitions such as workforce cooperation, partnership can be traced at least as far back as the practices of ‘enlightened’ employers in the early nineteenth century (Marchington 1998).