NEED FOR INTERPRETATION AND EVALUATION :
follow the leader, and are either skeptically appraising from the side
lines, or are openly declaring their hostility. No doubt among the
latter are some who habitually resist innovations even after they have
become standard practice for many successful concerns. Yet some of
this opposition to employee representation presumably is predicated
upon honest attempts to see whatever merit it may contain—and
inability, as yet, to find any.
SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF THIS INQUIRY
The purpose of the present inquiry is primarily qualitative rather
than quantitative. We are not so much concerned about the number
of companies which have adopted this or that procedure as we are
about the soundness of basic objectives and the practicability of
various practices for achieving them. A relatively few authenticated
cases, whose entire situations are clearly perceived, may throw vastly
more light upon pitfalls to be avoided and constructive potentialities
than reams of neatly tabulated statistics whose true interpretation
may be concealed behind faulty identification of unlike situations.
For this reason we have not used the questionnaire method so com-
monly employed to obtain data from large numbers of establishments.
First-hand investigation in a limited number of concerns, where much
documentary evidence has been investigated and interpreted in the
light of many interviews with various classes of employees and mem-
bers of the management staff, has proved, we believe, more fruitful.
Such field study has been supplemented by a number of round table
conferences, held in different cities, at which business executives
responsible for the effective operation of employee representation
and serious students of the social sciences have discussed at length
many fundamental aspects of the subject. These conferences have
helped to clarify the issues about which there is serious disagreement,
and in this way have aided materially in determining upon what
phases of individual company experience attention should be focused.
Such direct contact with experiences and opinions has been further
augmented by extensive correspondence and careful perusal of all
available literature treating of American experience.
It is not yet time to say the last word regarding employee represen-
tation; and the latest word, because of the vitality of the movement,
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