The Appeal and Difficulties of Participative Systems

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.