Participación y modernización en las PYME europeas

According to the hypothesis formulated in this article, the two typical concepts of social relations, community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft), as distinguished by Tonnies and Weber, allow for a heuristic distinction in the approach used in economics if the definition of community is updated. Indeed, the concept of corporation considered as the location of societal relationship necessarily has to take the productive community into account due to the incidence of current changes. In this new configuration, which breaks away from taylorian principles, if traditional occupations are destabilized, the behaviour demanded to workers resembles that developed in the professional universe. This explains the particular adaptation of certain small and medium-sized companies to the contemporary productive context. This is, at least, what is manifest in a comparative appraisal of participation practices carried out in European small and medium-sized companies (21 case-studies undertaken in four countries: Germany, Spain, France and Italy). Some of its conclusions are presented in this article.