Overall, this study generally supports the historical cycle approach to industrial democracy and notes a general wave of interest across all five countries from 1916 to 1922 and later a specific surge of interest in the US during the early 1930s. Labour unrest during and immediately after the First World War and concerns about the economic issues relating to post-war reconstruction fuelled interest. Some promoters of schemes believed that workplace employee representation could be part of an effective response to the threat of Bolshevism following the Russian Revolution. The period during and immediately after the First World War was very rich in experimentation with industrial democracy in the form of ERPs, union-management cooperation, Whitley works committees and German works councils, but all these ideas failed to sustain themselves significantly for the duration of the interwar period as wartime labour unrest subsided and the deterioration of several of the economies studied weakened labour. This was particularly notable in the UK, where government and employer interest in Whitley workplace committees diminished as the post-war boom broke in 1920 and the economy remained sluggish in the 1920s. There was a second wave of interest in ERPs in the US during the early 1930s as the New Deal encouraged labour organisation and employers looked at alternatives to trade unions.

Legislative intervention in the US, where ERPs were viewed as undermining legitimate trade unions, and in Germany, where the Nazis perceived works councils as an obstacle to their seizure of power, saw the banning of two of the ideas of workplace employee representation examined in this book during the 1930s. While the German works councils were re-established in West Germany in 1952, they were not seen as an improvement on the Weimar works councils, particularly from the perspective of the German trade union movement.

As Poole, Lansbury and Wailes note, though there may be macro conditions that favour industrial democracy, the adoption of employee participation at the level of the firm is subject to organisational choice by actors. It also reflects on the power of these actors and the organisational structures and processes at the level of the firm.