Democracy and worker representation in the management of change

What is it about?

Today questions of democracy and of its looming demise are high up the agenda of public discussion. This was also a pressing concern for Kurt Lewin, who fervently believed that democracy should not be taken for granted but must be actively fostered in small-group settings if it is to survive and thrive.While respecting Lewin’s huge contribution to organization theory, we submit his particular understanding to scrutiny, focusing in particular on how democratic participative decision making was enacted at the Marion plant of the Harwood Corporation, culminating in the famous resistance to change study by Coch & French (1948). These studies have since passed into management lore as providing definitive evidence for the superior power of democratic participative decision making in organization. We present an alternative narrative which challenges the received view of the Harwood studies to argue that in this context Lewin’s understanding and enactment of democracy was flawed.

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Why is it important?

Lewin’s work is directly relevant today as he set out to prove experimentally the superiority of democracy over autocracy and laissez-faire modes of organization.