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, 
23