The end of the cold war has brought with it a renewed interest in the United States in the possibility of converting military production facilities to civilian purposes. Indeed, with the proposed cuts in military spending and resultant decline in defense plant jobs, the need for conversion would appear to be more compelling than ever. Conversion supporters can also point to an abundance of research indicating that defense plants, with their highly skilled work force, are capable of producing alternative, civilian products. There have also been congressional proposals to facilitate the process. What there have not been yet are major conversion successes. The following pages are not an attempt to present the conversion issue in all the complexity it deserves.1 Instead this article surveys contemporary conversion efforts in order to provide the reader with both a sense of the issue as it exists today and an assessment of conversion's future. Part 1 of the article examines two examples of site conversion, that is, the attempt to transform production at specific defense plants to useful civilian manufacturing. Like other attempts at site conversion these two efforts have emphasized the role of workers and community groups in changing the production agenda of the firm. Thus they have been as much about workplace democracy as about economic conversion. Management's reaction to this challenge to its planning prerogatives was predictably negative. Diversification, a contemporary alternative to site conversion, is examined in part 2 of the article. The diversification approach, widely employed as a strategy in recent years, focuses on reducing the defense dependency of a region without attempting to convert a particular site. Like site conversion, however, the diversification cases considered here have included broad democratic participation in promoting production for civilian needs and markets. As such diversification is an indication of the kind of democratic