De Realiteitswaarde van de Notie Feitelijke Participatie Een Studie in De Variate Taal Van Het Socio-Psychologisch Onderzoek

[The Reality Value of the Conceit of Factual Participation. A Study in the “Variate Language” of Socio-Psychological Research]

The study tests the reality value of the conceptmodel, currently associated with the notion of factual participation. The testing is methodically innovated by the application of polynomial conjoint measurement (for the test of the structural meaning aspect) and multidimensional scaling, techniques (for the semantic meaning component). A preliminary research concerning the structural meaning of factual participation suggests the adoption of a simple additive model The semantic meaning of the notion is usually explicated by reference to the following quartet: modality, domain, direct versus indirect and personal versus impersonal. The relevance of these aspects is studied upon a sample of 40 subjects, who represent 4 hierarchical levels within the same industrial organization Their perception structure with regard to 9 descriptions of participative situations is analyzed by means of the INDSCAL-algorithm (Fig. 1 and 2). The same method is applied for the data, obtained from a first criteriongroup, consisting of experts (Fig 3a and 3b) To guide the interpretation of the extracted dimensions, factor analysis (Table 2), non-metric multidimensional scaling (Fig 4) and hierarchical cluster analysis are performed on a data-matrix of proximities between dimensions (including the four theoretical continue) A further in depth interpretation is provided by appealing to the radex theory (Tables 3 and 4). The final results suggest the deficiency of the presupposed semantic explication Workers seem to make a consistent use of only one aspect: direct versus indirect. The other three levels structure their perception mainly with the aid from the modality aspect and the distinction personal-impersonal. The study is finally situated as one out of a set of four possible designs (Table 5). It is further shown how a comparative analysis of the results, obtained under these settings, may provide information on the workers’ alienation.