THE APPEAL AND DIFFICULTIES OF PARTICIPATIVE SYSTEMS

One can identify compelling reasons for private and public organizatio ns to embrace participative systems. Scholars and organizational consu ltants maintain that organizations need such systems to prosper in an increasingly competitive and turbulent world, and that such changes ar e now taking place. Yet, participative techniques have diffused minima lly. Why is there such a discrepancy between the endorsements and adop tion of participative methods, despite the strong arguments for them a nd their intuitive appeal? This paper maintains that barriers to parti cipative systems are embedded in social, economic, and political princ iples deeply valued in their own right. Writings on participative syst ems treat these barriers as difficult problems that can be overcome th rough patient, well-designed behavioral and organizational interventio ns. In contrast, we suggest that the structures and attitudes impeding participative systems are usually valued more highly than the prospec tive gains from the systems, and that, in the future, true participati ve systems will have difficulty sustaining themselves in an organizati onal 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 specifi c contexts. The paper draws on two pertinent but heretofore disconnect ed scholarly literatures-the literatures on cooperation and on collabo ration-to analyze the experiences with participative systems in manage ment and regulatory policy. Four themes-prior dispositions toward coop eration, social and political organization, the nature of purposes, is sues, and values, and leadership capacity and style-are critical to un derstanding each area. Generally, participative systems bump into prob lems of collective action: dispositions against cooperating with prior adversaries, the costs of collaboration in complex social and politic al systems, the difficulties of engaging deep conflicts, and leadershi p incentives favoring control that develop in this context. These cond itions 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 suc h systems, and more extensive links among the various literatures on t he subject.