One of the things that impressed me about Elliott Jaques when I first read him was his stated desire to build democratic feeling within workers. It may have been the influence of Wilfred Brown at Glacier, as Brown was always interested in democracy and how to build it, leading to his great interest in workplace democracy which predated his work with Dr. Jaques. And Jaques certainly seems to have dropped many of the elements that Brown felt were necessary for participation, leaving it up to the managers to “do participation”, as it were. You’d think that anyone who would argue that structure can be paranoiagenic would also understand that you have to have structural elements that provide for participation, not just the goodwill of a manager to listen to his or her subordinates.

Still Jaques wrote about democratic society a little in several of his works. It’s what attracted me initially, so it’s worth revisiting at this point as I look into American democracy and the church.

Here’s what he says in the introduction to Requisite Organization:
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This week in the newsletter, I’ll be discussing how to level-shift your work so that you improve your chances of thriving in this wretched economy. If you’re a hidden high potential, it’s a great time because you have spare capability that you can use to change the game up (or down!) a level and sidestep all the competition. It’s the Kobayashi Maru solution for work: when you’re in a no-win game, change it so that it’s winnable.

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But here I’m going to be doing something a bit different than what I’ve done for the past couple of years and I wanted to warn those of you who would find it useless. This week I am going to be trying to raise a discussion about the role of Christian church models in the rise of democracy. I know that it has a limited audience but it fits, as it uses work levels (stratum) to discuss the problems confronting democracies. Some of the points are probably extendable to any community-based group, including other religious groups. However, I will be focusing on evangelical Protestantism. I meant to do this during Christmas but the Xmas Plague of 2008 sidelined me for an entire week.

So feel free to skip this week. Some of you are interested, and I hope that you will help out with the discussion.