The effects and impact of employee participation and employee ownership continue to be themes of enduring interest to social scientists from a range of disciplines. The analysis presented in this volume are representative of the best economics research being carried out in the study of labor and empirical studies. Several of the papers deal with the issue of privatization in transition economies, where a large number of newly privatized firms have effectively been transformed into employee owned enterprises. Other key themes covered in this volume are profit sharing in both East and West Europe, the issue of evolutionary transformation of cooperatives into conventional private firms, and the growing importance of the role of social cooperatives in the welfare state.