Companies As Democratic Places

Democracy is the form of life that corresponds to human existence in all its diversity. It is therefore the term for an order of meaning.

One of the tasks of politics in democracies is to facilitate this order of meaning. The current transformations in the world of life and work require a communal and social reorientation. It has to reflect on new forms of “we” within the economy: precisely because there are repeated efforts from various sides to question this “we” and thus the democratic way of life.

The Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament in Germany has initiated a project that has invited various companies to participate in the project “companies as places where democracy is lived”. The Academy of German Cooperatives provided research support for this project. The project consisted of two workshops, the first of which took place in the state parliament and the second in the companies themselves. We conducted interviews with the participants (trainees and managers) before and after the workshops. The aim of the project on the part of the state parliament was to promote democratic agency and inspire more commitment. We asked about the participants' understanding of democracy, about the challenges that democracies are currently facing, and the democratic relationships within the companies. We also investigated whether and how the participants' understanding of democracy changed as a result of taking part in the project. Another aim of the study was to determine the differences and similarities in perspective with regard to the participants' understanding of democracy, to document the new perspective envisaged by the project and to ask what effects a change of perspective has on the participants' everyday lives and in the companies.

We would be pleased to present the results of the study at the 5th ISA Forum of Sociology.