HRD and the democratic ideal:
The conflict of democratic values in undemocratic work systems
Tim Hatcher, University of Louisville, USA
Monica Lee, Lancaster University, UK.
Abstract.
In this paper we explore the disjunction between the democratic ideals of the HRD profession and the reality of undemocratic organizations arguing that HRD is at a cross-roads and must decide its direction.
How can a profession that espouses democratic ideals such as workplace empowerment, teamwork and the promise of ethical behaviors support organizations and work systems that are undemocratic even totalitarian; that view workers and society as mere resources or worse as objects of abuse? There appears prima facie to be an inherent contradiction between the profession of HRD that advocates democratic ideals and the reality that it contributes to the success of many autocratic and some socially irresponsible systems.
The extent that HRD as a profession is in conflict with the organizations to which it professes to add value has not been examined nor has the impact of the contradiction of values that exists between HRD and the role it assumes within undemocratic work-related systems. Thus in this paper we examine this conflict and contradiction by addressing the ideals that HRD espouses versus the context in which such ideals are applied, namely contemporary work environments. But before we discuss this conflict it is important to examine the notion of a profession and its role in society. For purposes of this discussion, and because democracy is so misrepresented and misinterpreted, we offer an examination of its characteristics and definitions. After which we will delineate espoused values of HRD as those mirroring democratic ideals and then describe the work-related contexts in which these ideals are currently being applied. We conclude with a discussion of one probable recourse, that of working within the inherent conflict between our professional ideals and their relevance in undemocratic global work environments.
A Profession: Its Definition and Role in Society
A profession is a collection of associates who avow, declare, or profess; and share a common occupational orientation. Characteristics that differentiate a profession from an occupation or a collection of skills include: (a) advanced competencies and an established knowledgebase, (b) mutual worldviews of members, and (c) the provision of products and/or services important to society. Physicians for example adhere to certain explicit sets of competencies and collective knowledge which allows for shared worldviews and what is of paramount importance to this discussion, a raison d'être to enhance society though alleviating the suffering of its citizens. And they accomplish the tenets of their profession regardless of the context; even in the daunting face of organizational constraints and limitations such as those imposed by Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) or socialized medicine. Through long-term sustenance of their ideals in the form of the Hippocratic Oath physicians have maintained their capacity to serve people and society. The public accepts and supports the physician profession’s ability to operate largely unimpeded because of the inherent social, ethical, and instrumental ‘good’ that results from their skills and knowledge. The way in which warring faction’s allow volunteers from organizations such as the Red Cross entry into combat zones to aid the suffering is a good example of how a profession that is trusted by society can ‘rise above’ its context.
A profession’s relationship with society is governed by the extent the public requires what the profession offers and what is fundamental to human survival and growth. But clearly, a profession dedicated to enhancing humanity and the systems it relies on for survival and growth cannot isolate itself from its environment. Professions are part of society. If they are not responsive to social needs, like a filing clerk or elevator operator they stagnate, become ineffectual or vanish. But what happens when the system within which a profession works begins to unduly influence the behaviors of its professionals? This is well illustrated by the recent wave of unethical behaviors by members of the professions of management (executives) and accountancy (accountants) of Enron, Anderson, WorldCom and several other large predominately western-based companies. In these examples, their ideals were subjugated to the external demands of the market and Wall Street, and in the case of accountants even a highly visible professional code of ethics was unable to affect their behaviors.
Reasons for this coercion include the assumption that economics influences the behaviors of professional because motives are simple and easily characterized. Thus economics disregards complex ethical considerations (Tomer, 1994) by assuming that people are essentially self-interested. However, morality plays an important role in many decisions. For example, Frank (1996) found that moral concerns figure prominently in career decisions. The systems within which these professionals worked have been themselves subjugated to the larger system of capitalist/consumer economics that flies in the face of the ideal of democracy; an ideal that is assaulted within corporate and global environments and one that requires our attention.
Democracy as Ideal and as Global Capitalism
The word ‘democracy’ is being bandied around across the world as a signifier of a ‘good’ thing, with little thought to what it actually means. This is particularly true when democracy is discussed within the context of a profession. In this section we begin by suggesting that democracy as an ideal form of government and then discuss it in economic terms as capitalism. Table 1 offers a range of qualia are often associated with democracy. These could be encapsulated by the notion of a people-centered focus on representation and equality.
“By the people, for the people” / Participation“Equality of rights” / Freedom of association (Dahl, 1971)
Opportunity and treatment” (Webster, 1990, p.160). / Freedom of expression (Dahl, 1971)
Focus on people / Majority rule
Liberty, equality, justice, freedom / Representation
Human capacity / Self-governing
Free and fair elections / Pluralism
Territorial boundaries / Competition
Winners and losers / Exercise of power
Table 1. Democratic Qualia
This list of democratic qualia, however, has contradictory aspects. For example, how can the notion of equality of rights fit with that of the exercise in power, or that of liberty for all fit with majority rule? Can democracies encompass diversity? Can minorities thrive under majority rule? Can we have democracy without participation? The problem is that each of these qualia are both ideals and have implications for practice. Whilst we might agree that each of the qualia is a ‘good thing’ in its own right, when we think of it in practical terms, its implementation contradicts the implementation of other qualia. Those people who propound democracy as a human right and a necessary form of governance normally do so by holding up the ideal for inspection (often without stating which qualia they are referring to) without specifying the complexity of its implementation, and without examining in any detail the contradictions that would be fostered by such implementation.
This can be highlighted by examining a distinction that Hopfl (1999) makes between aspects of the democratic ideal of exercise of power, namely, between Auctoritas, or moral authority, and Postestas, or the rights of office. ‘Auctoritas is a capacity to initiate and inspire respect. It can be an attribute of either persons or of institutions, customs and practices, but with the conspicuous difference that as an attribute of institutions and practises authority is a stabiliser and consolidator, something exempting them from the flux, but as an attribute of persons it may well be destabilising’ (Hopfl, 1999, p. 222) . In contrast, he argues that potestas ‘is the property of an office, not a person. It means the right to act derived from an office … And, unlike auctoritas, it can be assigned, distributed, redistributed, shared around and / or withdrawn, for all of this may, in principle, be done to or with offices’ (Hopfl, 1999, p. 223). In effect, this is a contrast between the ideal, the qualia in its most excellent form, the unobtainable to be striven towards, and the implementation – the system-based taking of action and the managing, in which the power to act is derived from the form of governance and not from the individual reaching out for the ideal.
However, we also find contradiction when we look at the practical implications of what is meant by ‘democracy’. The word ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek demos (people) and kratos (rule) – in other words ‘rule by the people’. In this sense of democracy those that are in ‘power’ can always be overturned by the people. In brief, if we look at the form of rule, in participatory or direct democracy decisions are made communally by all those who are affected by them. This is normally only practical in small societies, though nation-wide referenda on major issues are still conducted, particularly in Europe. Some large societies, such as the US, have adopted representative democracy, in which individuals are chosen to represent groups of people, and then those individuals together, rule. Methods of choice, extent of power and length of term differ across the world. Liberal democracies are those representative democracies in which voters can choose between two or more parties, and normally all adults are able to vote. These contrast with those, such as rule by what was termed communism (the practice rather than the ideal), in which all adults are able to vote for representatives, but the choice is people of the same party. One could question whether in some countries where the choice is limited to that between two similar ‘parties’, the form of governance is not that of a covert choice between people and no longer between parties. Normally, when people talk of democracy, they actually mean liberal democracy. Several countries that many would assume to be liberal democracies are actually monarchies in which the people do not have the constitutional right to overturn the ruling elite. Some, such as the UK, Sweden and Japan, exercise little power over the government, whereas others, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, continue to ‘rule’ in the more traditional sense.
In general, as globalization has driven the integration of societies they have abandoned direct democracy in favour of representative democracy (normally liberal). In so doing, the culturally based rules of one society have rubbed up against different rules of other societies or corporations disguised as societies, such that integration has led to increasingly complicated legislation, as can be seen both in Europe and the US. The law, which previously had been carried by cultural mores and thus remained unspecified, is extended to cover all aspects of potentially conflicting mores, and becomes all-encompassing. An increasingly large electorate is matched by an increasingly small electorate/representative ratio, such that minority concerns become increasingly marginalized with less of a voice, and without direct democracy, the people no longer have a individual and direct impact upon the decisions that affect them. Voter apathy is becoming a major problem for liberal democracy, as for example, in last years elections in France.
We are now in a situation in many of the large ‘democracies’ in which the rule is by the few people who vote. Voters tend to do so because they have vested interests. The polity rest with many interests groups that serve as guardians of the welfare of their constituents. “Individuals perceive their own interests, organize around concerns that affect their well-being, voice their desires through these organizations, and battle other similarly organized interests for scarce resources”. (Madisonian p. 89)
The development of large liberal democracies is matched by the development of alienated minorities and lends itself to be used by those within the system as a way of eschewing the ideals of democracy that focus upon equality and justice for all whilst espousing the system for their own personal interest. As Hopfl says:
Democracy appeals not to contingent, circumstantial goals like efficacy and success, which no arrangement whatever can guarantee, but to the inherent freedom, justice, equity and consensuality of its procedures themselves irrespective of outcomes.…. It is therefore of little wonder that a democratic legitimation…proves increasingly irresistible, the more complex the organisation, the more vulnerable it is to subversion or incompetence on the part of even the humblest associate, and the more opaque its character and purposes. But success is not an optional extra in associations, and success is precisely the one good that democracy cannot guarantee. In any case, democratic arrangement cannot confer auctoritas. (Hopfl, 1999, p.231).
The contexts of democracy: The undemocratic workplace
It is also clear that the vast majority of profit seeking organizations do not have democratic structures (by which we exclude social and voluntary organizations who tend to have some form of open representation). If we look at this more locally, most free market organizations have non-democratic structures. Family firms tend towards Patriarchy and nepotism; whilst those that survive past the third generation tend towards Plutocracy and Ogliarchy although most espouse principles of Meritocracy.
The manner in which many actually experience a form of free market democracy is through global capitalism. What Solzhenitsyn called ‘savage capitalism’ and Korten (1996) called ‘economic liberalism’, free market global capitalism has supplanted pluralist democracy as a Western economic and ethnocentric imperative. This lack of economic pluralism which led to the decline of the Soviet sociopolitical system creates economies that are unable to respond to opportunity, unresponsive to societal needs and irresponsible in sustaining human and natural resources. Korten (1996) contends that in free market capitalism power rests in unaccountable centralized institutions such as MNOs that “invite and reward the abuse of power” (p.190), and promote massive Wal-Mart like institutions that consume the social capital and erode the moral fabric of society. Some of the qualia of democracy presented in Table 1, such as Territorial boundaries, competition, winners and losers and the exercise of power seem more closely associated with free market democracy than with democracy as an ideal.
One has to look no further than the original 16th Century notion of the corporate charter to realize that companies were never intended to possess democratic ideals. To alleviate undue financial burdens for investors in risky foreign trade, the corporate charter was a grant of privilege from the English crown that limited an investor’s liability for losses equal to the amount of the investment. “The corporate charter opened enormous new opportunities to advance the interests of human societies – so long as civil society held it in check the potential abuse that the concentration of power made possible” (Korten, 1995, p. 55). The idea of pooled capital and shared liability that early charters advocated laid the foundation for the modern corporation as a legal entity with limited financial liability for its stockholders and the power to allocate costs to multiple stakeholders including the public. For example, today GE assumes no financial responsibility for a refrigerator after the warranty expires. The costs of long tern maintenance, handling, transport, dismantling, recycling and/or storage in a landfill for the hundreds of years it takes for the myriad of materials it contains to decompose is bourn by the public.
Through the Courts, corporations have garnered rights similar to those of people. They have taken on the semblance of human and civil rights; that a corporation, which exists solely on paper, has the right to act in any way it deems necessary to survive. The assumption is that these rights prevail over an individual’s right to object – and historically this is the case. Furthermore, the moral standing of the corporation which can be held legally liable similar to an individual has been the subject of much debate.
Morality, a uniquely human characteristic, plays a curious role in corporations that are chartered primarily for economic purposes. Unlike people, modern companies have little interests besides that of profit. They posses an impersonal, almost omnipotent air, that sets them apart from the vulnerable individual. As Donaldson (1982) suggested corporations are ‘persona ficta’, unreal entities with no conscience, emotions, or body. Thus, we tend to excuse excesses and bad behaviors that we would never accept in the individual sans the corporation.
Because a corporation is neither completely ‘flesh’ nor ‘fantasy’, it possesses a special ambiguity that discourages democracy. This uncertainty is compounded by managerialism. In the modern organization managers function as a group independent from stakeholders and workers actualizing particular interests of their own. The recent debacle of Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Adelphia’s John Rigas are vivid examples of the chasm between executives’ and stakeholders’ interests. The severing of management from stakeholders and employees is a predominately US business characteristic.
Legislation promoting corporate democracy has been quashed in the US since the early 1980s when the Corporate Democracy Act of 1980 was killed by the US Senate. And more recently, former President Clinton’s committee on corporate social responsibility was discounted by the George W. Bush administration even in the face of widespread corporate ethics scandals. Corporations are responsible for firings of thousands of employees, massive plant closures and the transfer of facilities offshore, reductions in wages and benefits, increased workloads, and escalating corporate crime unchecked by government, the only institution charged with policing such actions. Simultaneously, and not surprisingly, organized labor, a distinct voice for democratic ideals in the workplace has suffered a decline from 30% of the workforce in 1977 to just 13.5% in 2001. This lack of workplace democracy is not as yet globally endemic. In Europe for example, more developed legislation limiting corporate power has been in place for some time. Europeans generally share a cultural understanding that production has an overriding social good and that the voices of all stakeholders should be heard equally (Deetz, 1992). And although of concern the overall reduction of unionized labor is not as severe. Western European union density remains at approximately 30%, a 25% decline within two decades (Scruggs, 2002). Wage inequalities being smallest in highly unionized countries suggests that a reduction in union membership equates to an overall decline in workplace democratic ideals.