Teaching Workplace Democracy

Abstract

In spite of its intrinsic importance, there is no academic afield called ''workplace democracy.'' Yet six years of teaching and redesigning courses in this area have convinced me ?and other Hampshire faculty mem bers?that it is a subject that coheres around fundamental social questions and that lends itself extremely well to the type of critical inquiry we value at Hampshire. Why is there no field of workplace de mocracy? Because even at the more gen eral level, the study of work, the experi ence of work, and how work is organized do not constitute an important category of study within the mainstream social sciences. Economists, psychologists, and sociologists have given each other the responsibility to make the organiza tion and control of the workplace a cen tral axis for ordering their disciplines.1 At a few major universities, industrial sociology and industrial psychology have become free-standing mini-disci plines. Business schools and polytechnic institutes, prodded by events in the 1960s, sought to expand their focus be yond the efficient management of the la bor processes to a more human-centered approach?in courses that discussed a changing work ethic and the advantages of redefining corporate liberalism to

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