Organizational Democracy is Dead, Long Live Organizational Democracy! Drivers for and Rationales of a Long-Living Idea

Starting with industrialization and witnessing several waves of surge and decline, organizational democracy still seems simply not to be written off today. Based on both prior historical work on the decentralization of decision-making and on recent practitioner-based outlets, I identify eleven drivers for organizational democracy since the beginning of the 20th century, sorted by their apparition time and questioning what their underlying rationales are. While performing the analysis, the study detects a recent shift to individual-level rationales of democracy in organizations over the past two decades. The study describes organizational democracy as a reaction to outside pressures and adds knowledge to the historical perspective on organizational democracy.