Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
As Ed Collom (2003) has noted in another context, increased employee participa-
tion in workplace decision-making can in certain circumstances empower workers,
leading to greater commitment and satisfaction, and so improve company performance.
Janice Foley and Michael Polanyi (2006) go a little further, arguing that there are
sound arguments in favour of workplace democracy generally - i.e. real control over
organizational goal setting and strategic planning, apart from the positive impact on
'the bottom line'. These include increasing employee morale, encouraging participa-
tion in wider democratic political processes, ethics - i.e. 'the right thing to do' - and
perhaps most significantly, workplace democracy, which has clear beneficial effects
on employee mental and physical health. In relation to employee well-being, such as
work-life balance, job security and decision latitude or control over the nature of
the work itself are of real significance. In addition, as Johnston Birchall (2003) and
Nicole Goler von Ravensburg (2011) write, entrepreneurs' co-operatives can play
a role in strengthening social dialogue and securing 'decent work' goals because
co-operatives are invariably acceptable negotiating partners to unions, employers'
organizations and governments. They also have the wider potential to raise skills,
open up markets and improve working conditions in the informal economy, too.
Roberto Unger and the inspiring politics of false necessity
In an extensive series of writings and reflections, Roberto Unger, looking very much
to the radicalized constitutional and democratic experiments in Brazil, offers not so
much a blueprint for institutional and behavioural change but what he terms a 'music'
- something that lives in sequence, that is sustained by a credible image of change,
enabling the exploration of different pathways at different points, although still
moving in the same direction. His argument is that institutional innovation is central
to political transformation and the larger aims of radical democratic experimentation
and emancipation. Attempting to avoid the pitfalls of socialism and capitalism, Unger
asserts that, because everything is essentially 'just politics', human agency is paramount.
The world is as it is, not as it either could or should be. 'It can always be refashioned.
The result is not to deny the weight of the constraints upon transformative action',
Unger (2004: 30) writes, but to recognize there is a 'negative capability', that the
formative contexts of social, political and economic life can be destabilized. It requires
people to change, to bring under their control and vision their institutions, practices
and assumptions. In changing institutions, we change ourselves, and in doing so we
reduce the distance between our ordinary everyday actions and the more exceptional
ones that challenge and change them. To do this we need to understand society and
ourselves; we need to develop new habits and methods of thought and marry them
to action. Although Unger rarely refers to sustainability or sustainable development,
his political project is an important element of the dialogue of values that informs
the sustainable development process. For Unger, imagination, 'the infinity of the
mind', educates radical pragmatism by recognizing the multifaceted nature of human
experience. There is always 'more in us' individually and collectively. Only when we
realize this will we discover what may be possibly engendered through the interaction
of general ideas with particular discoveries and real-world innovations. This means,
he says, that we do not need to take established social and political arrangements
as the inevitable frameworks within which we develop our ideals and fulfil our
interests in reconciling empowerment with solidarity, greatness with love and the
