Theoretical Postulations on Organization Democracy

Abstract

In previous research the author conducted a narrative examination of the literature on labor-managed firms to discover the nature of “organization democracy.” The result was a broad conceptual framework. This article builds on the framework by offering two theoretical postulations. First, it offers a substantive theoretical postulation that organization democracy is a conflation of political visions that can be represented by Mannheim’s (1936) four utopian images of anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism. Second, it offers a formal theoretical postulation that organization democracy is an additional form of legitimate authority to add to Weber’s (1947, 1978) typology. The author proposes “rational-collective” legitimate authority as the fourth form and ends with a two-dimensional representation of the four types of legitimate authority.