Abstract
‘it seems that in academic institutions there is a disproportionally high percentage of cognitively, emotionally, socially, and especially morally severely limited and distorted, mean, and useless cowards, psychopaths, inept managers, and dysfunctional leaders – especially among academics who also carry out management functions – and the higher those positions are the worse it is.’ (p. 129)
Its always struck me as a massive example of cognitive dissonance that people who would defend the noble idea of democracy in their state often assume that democracy at work is impossible. Whatever their reasons, and there are many, most work organizations are simply exempted from the requirement to share responsibility, power and profit. Universities, of course, are no exception.
Thomas Diefenbach is not impressed with contemporary organizations, having experienced them and studied them ‘as severely distorted, hierarchical and oppressive, managerial, and miserable social systems’ (p. 4). He’s been writing about this for some time, too with a series of – to my mind – underappreciated works on hierarchy and managerialism (Diefenbach, 2009, 2015; Diefenbach and Todnem By, 2012). This book is his attempt to move away from the safety of critique, and put forward a positive theory of why democratic organizations are novel, necessary and possible. I think he does a terrific job.
There is too much detail here to do the book justice, but I can summarise the broad argument. Diefenbach argues that the orthodox organization, with its reliance on hierarchy, reduces free and intelligent people to cognitive and emotional toddlers (p. 12), as well as providing a playground for ‘anti-social perpetrators’ (p. 223). There is more than an echo of Adorno and Fromm’s analysis of the ‘authoritarian personality’ here, of the type of person who produces and is produced by the requirement to worship obedience.
In contrast, Diefenbach summarises the democratic organization as an ‘ideal type’ (though this is not a concept he uses) which draws upon a range of practices which we might associate with alternative organizations, though is not reducible to them. It is a ‘nonhierarchical organisation that pursues and serves multi-dimensional (social, political, legal, economic, and/or environmental) purposes in considerate, balanced, and sustainable ways and that is owned, managed, and controlled individually, collectively, and democratically by all of its members, who have equal rights, and are equally empowered, to participate fully in the governance and management of the organisation, organisational affairs, and activities’ (p. 31).
In drawing his model of the democratic organization he draws on elements of the social and solidarity economy, particularly co-operative ownership and control, conjoining that with a libertarian constitution based on self-ownership, that is to say, individual freedom. Diefenbach’s is not a communist or state socialist ideal type because it is predicated on the defence of personal and collective property rights. He argues that it is precisely those rights which enable a meaningful sense of empowerment. There is an interesting conjoining of radical ideas with some fairly traditional elements of liberal constitutionalism here. Self-management and collective ownership are combined with ideas about the separation of powers and checks and balances. The sort of project groups which can be found in every contemporary knowledge company are fundamentally changed by having a form of representative management which is elected and replaceable and a subsidiarity which demands that decision making should only be taken from workers if there is a functional need for that to be the case
Diefenbach is against hierarchy and autocracy, and prefers what he calls heterarchy, again defined as a ‘separation of powers’. This means that he is not against all hierarchical orders, instead insisting that the existence of any order must depend on continued consent, and always be informed by the default assumption that workers are self-managing. And if people in an organization are not fully engaged in the democratic process, then questions must be asked about how they are being disempowered, and how formal, psychological and social empowerment can work against disempowerment. Finally he embeds this within a theory of ‘social purpose’ in which a continuum of organizations from the mafia, to the corporation, to the democratic organization are arranged in terms of how we might assess the value of their goals.
I like this model, this ‘ideal type’. It seems to me that it proposes an account of life in organizations which is likely to be better for workers, and which is likely to produce lower carbon and higher inclusion. The problem that, as with any book written by an organization theorist, it largely remains at the level of organization theory, and this presents two sorts of difficulty. The first is to say that there is no account of the wider economic and political forces that shape organizations here and so that, despite an excellent concluding chapter on ‘why there are so few democratic organizations’, this thesis keeps coming back to an organizational ideal type, not a political programme. But the large unacknowledged animal outside the seminar room is, as ever, the context that shapes any and all organizations – whether we call that capitalism, the state, corporate interests, inequalities of wealth within and between nations and so on.
That disciplinary specialization leaves me with some big questions about the possible politics of something which restricts itself to organization studies which are rather relevant to this journal, but the other problem is audience. Who will read this book? The saddest thing about this splendid piece of scholarship is that Diefenbach’s voice will not be heard. Apart from a few academics, this is work which is preaching to a very small and scholarly choir. It is expensive, densely written and mortared together with paragraph length lists of references proving particular points. It is unlikely to be read by activists, and I find it difficult to imagine that any market managerialists would select this for their holiday read. Ironically, the author knows this, because he understands the importance of access to knowledge in thinking about meaningful empowerment. Academic publishing mystifies, because contemporary academic managerialism, and the cowards and psychopaths who make it happen, trade on selling their mysteries for money. The ideas in this book are terrific, so now it needs to be rewritten as a comic book and given away for free.
‘In its essence, demystification is the opposite of specialization and professionalization. Where experts and professionals seek licenses to hoard or at least get paid for their knowledge, collectivists would give it away. Central to their purpose is the breakdown of the division of labor and pretense of expertise. In effect, demystification reinforces egalitarian, democratic control over the organization.’ (p. 113)
