The Appeal and Difficulties of Participative Systems

Abstract

One can identify compelling reasons for private and public organizations to embrace participative systems. Scholars and organizational consultants maintain that organizations need such systems to prosper in an increasingly competitive and turbulent world, and that such changes are now taking place. Yet, participative techniques have diffused minimally. Why is there such a discrepancy between the endorsements and adoption of participative methods, despite the strong arguments for them and their intuitive appeal? This paper maintains that barriers to participative systems are embedded in social, economic, and political principles deeply valued in their own right. Writings on participative systems treat these barriers as difficult problems that can be overcome through patient, well-designed behavioral and organizational interventions. In contrast, we suggest that the structures and attitudes impeding participative systems are usually valued more highly than the prospective gains from the systems, and that, in the future, true participative systems will have difficulty sustaining themselves in an organizational landscape that continues to favor systems of centralized control. Similar impediments operating in areas as different as management and government regulation suggest basic processes that rise above specific contexts. The paper draws on two pertinent but heretofore disconnected scholarly literatures—the literatures on cooperation and on collaboration—to analyze the experiences with participative systems in management and regulatory policy. Four themes—prior dispositions toward cooperation, social and political organization, the nature of purposes, issues, and values, and leadership capacity and style—are critical to understanding each area. Generally, participative systems bump into problems of collective action: dispositions against cooperating with prior adversaries, the costs of collaboration in complex social and political systems, the difficulties of engaging deep conflicts, and leadership incentives favoring control that develop in this context. These conditions repeatedly undermine incipient, fragile participative systems. The study of participation would benefit from closer attention to how social, economic, and political structures constrain or facilitate such systems, and more extensive links among the various literatures on the subject.

Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science

“…The collective action model operates in science and elsewhere (e.g. Aldrich, 1999;Monge, Fulk, Kalman, Flanagin, Parnassa, and Rumsey, 1998;McCaffrey, Faerman, and Hart, 1995;Coleman, 1973;Eyerman and Jamison, 1991;Hess, 1998;Melucci, 1999). It requires that contributors relinquish control of knowledge they have developed for a project and make it a public good by unconditionally supplying it to a "common pool".…”

Corporate Community Engagement: Literature Search for Construct Validation. A Case of the Extractive Industry in Zimbabwe

“…In contrast, transformational engagement is the most proactive corporate engagement strategy. Literature has it that this form of engagement is characterized by joint learning and sense making [13], [11]), the joint management of projects with communities [17], [18] and community leadership in decision-making. Transformational engagement is distinctive because; organizations may achieve outcomes that were unattainable without the engagement of the community and the community takes a supported leadership role in framing problems and managing solutions.…”

“…Thus, this distribution of sources over time does not necessarily mean that interest in transformational approaches is waning, merely that it is more difficult to access, interpret and publish transformational engagement studies. The shared identity of community actors [18], resources available to the community [19] the structure of community groups [21] and the nature of the social issue being addressed [17] also impact the nature and success of community engagement strategy.…”

“…In social work, community participation refers to "the active voluntary engagement of individuals and groups to change problematic conditions and to influence policies and programs that affect the quality of their lives or the lives of others" [29] Effective community participation has the potential to facilitate social and personal empowerment, economic development, and socio-political transformation [18]. However, there are obstacles like the power of central bureaucracies, the lack of local skills and organizational experience, social divisions, and the impact of national and transnational structures [18]. There is no clearcut agreement in the literature of development projects on the nature of community participation or on a prescription to ensure it.…”

Commentaries on 'Trusting the surgeon: A tornado from Bristol' (editorial)

“…Here is some evidence for mine: organisational culture can be modified, but usually slowly (Stinchcombe 1965); systems tend to resist change (McCaffrey, Faerman & Hart 1995); professions tend to close ranks and ostracise internal critics, especially whistle blowers (Goldbeck-Wood 1997; Klein 1998); and clinicians and units which do low volumes of any particular case type have poorer outcomes than those which do high volumes (Phillips & Luft 1997).…”