Workers’ participation in economic affairs is a subject of research in many disciplines. This survey is limited to purely theoretical consideration of an economic nature. The scope of the present paper is thus rather narrow and excludes several important dimensions of the participation question. For one, this survey only deals with economics problem. It is, of course, an open question whether it is meaningful at all to aspects of participation. Secondly, participation as analysed in the surveyed literature is limited to participation in firms. Community participation, state planning, etc. are neither assumed away nor explicitly incorporated into the analytical framework. So no answer is suggested to the question whether democracy in the firm is viable without much wider reforms. Thirdly, no account is given here of empirical studies of work on that area and the limited number of available studies of high quality.