On democracy and the workplace: HRD's battle with DDD (democracy deficit disorder)
✍ Scribed by Tim Hatcher
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2004
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 53 KB
- Volume
- 15
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Observing the U.S. government' s attempts to install democratic governments in the Middle East, coupled with participating in and/or observing the electoral process in the United States, we have been inundated with the proviso of democracy. Democracy demands deliberative discourse, human rights, representative government, religious tolerance, and mutual respect. Democracy also requires a community with agents or citizens who relate to one another in equal and autonomous and moral and politically equal ways. Without a passionate consideration of justice, democracy is not possible.
The pace of political change during the past few decades has been truly remarkable. From Costa Rica to India, from Taiwan to Namibia, from the Soviet Union to Iraq, the demand for democracy has increased a hundredfold. A survey of global political change in the twentieth century by Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org), a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, found that 120 of the 192 existing nations-some 62 percent of the world' s populationare rated as liberal and electoral democracies. If democracy can exist in such wildly dissimilar and culturally diverse environments, why can't it exist in the workplace or within a profession that espouses its values?
This editorial highlights the relationship among the state, the workplace, democracy, and human resource development (HRD); we are suffering from a malady termed DDD (Democracy Deficit Disorder). Treatment for this sickness is suggested.
The State and the Workplace
Deetz (1992) claims the state, to which we turn for democratic accountability, is being increasingly redefined as minimally involved in the social and political lives of people and as a self-seeking promoter of commercialism to fulfill its public obligations. And as organizations become more powerful by focusing