Participation as a Collusive Quarrel

Abstract

The following article has its basis in the respective chapter of my book entitled Work, Death, and Life Itself (Sievers, 1994). In the present article I intend to elaborate the working hypothesis that the attempt to increase and extend participation in contemporary work enterprises can be understood more than ever before as a collusive quarrel between managers and workers about immortality. The quarrel has its roots in the widespread experience of the discrepancy between the vigour with which participation in organisations is demanded and offered on the one hand and the inadequacy and limitations of its actual realisation on the other. Attempts to increase participation in a work enterprise are often confronted at an early stage with insoluble difficulties which too often lead to termination of the participation project. Although participation in general, and in work enterprises in particular, is generally seen as a paradigm (or metaphor) for integration, co-operation and democratisation among more or less equal partners, I propose the hypothesis that any attempt to practice participation will most probably lead to a situation in which management and workers get entangled in a collusive quarrel concerning the preconditions, content and range of said participation. Sustained by the predominant myth that management means the management of people, workers tend to become infantilised. The deep contempt and mistrust that so often characterise relations between managers and workers and/or their respective representatives thus poisons any simultaneous desire for trust and cooperation. In an analogy with ancient Greek mythology and its inherent quarrel between the immortal gods and the mortal ephemerals, the collusion between management and workers in contemporary work enterprises can be understood as a quarrel about participating in immortality. Since immortality is a limited resource, it is only available to the happy few. The collusive quarrel and the underlying split between managers and workers can only be overcome if both parties recognise that as human beings they can neither escape mortality nor relieve the other of it. Looking back on my own experiences as an organisational consultant I am reminded of numerous times I have been confronted with the discrepancy of participation in theory and participation in practice. “Implementing employee involvement is so complex, so difficult, and, not uncommonly, so frustrating, that it is easier to talk about than to do” (Semler, 1989, p. 77). Insoluble difficulties are often encountered when attempting to increase participation in a work enterprise and projects intending to lead to change are often broken off before achieving their aims. On such occasions it appears to me as though “the participation issue... is now nothing but a hobby of the academics without resonance among those who do the real work” (Jahoda, 1979, p. 208). On the other hand, in my work with a variety of organisations, I have repeatedly experienced the enormous difficulties which the demand for participation evokes. Some of the managers in a German subsidiary of an international American tyre company, for example, justified their own reservations about co-operating in a participative manner with the works council by accusing the workers’ representatives of being agents of a militant union, naively unaware that the workers might have viewed them in turn as agents of an exploiting capitalist multinational. Another example is that of a Protestant hospital in Germany at which the cautious attempts of the top management group to get the employees on lower levels — nurses, physicians and administrative staff — more intensively involved in the primary task of caring for the patients were resisted by the