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THIS ARTICLE ATTEMPTS TO TEST THE WIDELY SHARED VIEW THAT THE EXPERIENCE OF INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY, THE EXPERIENCE OF DIRECT DECISION MAKING AT PLACES OF WORK, NECESSARILY LEADS TO THE ENHANCEMENT OF COOPERATIVE AND EGALITARIAN ORIENTATIONS AMONG PARTICIPANTS. THE AUTHOR CONCLUDES THAT SUCH EXPERIENCE ENCOURAGES THE DEVELOPMENT OF "POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM."

This timely book investigates the experiences of employees at all levels of Boeing Commercial Airplanes during a ten-year period of dramatic organizational change. As Boeing transformed itself, workers and managers contended with repeated downsizing, shifting corporate culture, new roles for women, outsourcing, mergers, lean production, and rampant technological change. Some employees welcomed these changes, others wilted, but almost none escaped the ill effects associated with the rapid and extensive workplace change.

The "corporate liberal" regime that held together in America from the end of World War I1 to the 1960s was marked by broad agreement on ideology, public policy and a stable ruling coalition centered in the Democratic Party. This regime unraveled in the late 1960s and 1970s with the relative decline in American military and economic hegemony and the rise of a "left liberal insurgency". Key corporate liberal intellectuals and constituencies migrated to the Republican Party under Reagan. Reaganism will not sustain itself because its coalition partners are too disparate, its failure to transform the Republicans into a majority party, a lack of consensus on many issues, and the continued decline of the U.S. in the international economy. Corporate liberalism will find itself migrating to a revitalized Democratic Party, under a centrist leadership favoring fiscal responsibility, government‐corporate partnerships, and a more efficient military.