Company democracy is often misunderstood in the business context as democracy is usually related to politics. In this book, the authors present a different dimension. They focus first on democracy from an organizational culture perspective and then offer employees opportunities to understand and apply democracy from the company floor level. The Company Democracy Model (CDM) is an industry-wide, practical methodology for knowledge management utilization under applied philosophical thinking. The model progresses through a framework in which an organizational evolutionary spiral method empowers the creation of knowledge-based democratic cultures for wise and effective strategic management and leadership. This new innovative methodology, supported with techniques and processes, can gain/create many ideas, insights, innovations, new products, and services that can benefit a company. One purpose of using the model is to create a robust conceptual framework as a theoretical basis for a business strategy that promotes sustainable, continuous, and democratic development. Another purpose is to emphasize the importance of intellectual capital and compare capital-related and human-related business issues in shaping a company’s competitiveness, profitability, productivity, performance, and shared value. A third purpose is to use its symbolic infrastructure that builds solid democratic systems for viable business development and management. Finally, the described purposes give the reader new ideas to change and improve the design of business activities in a collective and modern democratic way.

Prevailing models of organisation divide people into owners, managers and employees, forcing especially the latter to obey, to behave, and to function well within a hierarchical and managerial pecking order. However, there is no natural law suggesting the need for such organisations, not in market economies and definitely not in modern democratic societies – and there is no justification for such types of organisation. Arguing that most current organisations are orthodox, hierarchical, anti-democratic, oppressive, unfair, and unjust, this book presents a viable alternative, a better type of organisation – the democratic organisation. Diefenbach develops and provides step by step a systematic, comprehensive, thorough, and detailed general model of the democratic organisation. He describes the democratic organisation’s fundamental principles, values, governance, management, structures, and processes, and the ways it functions and operates both within the organisation and towards others and the environment. Crucially, and most importantly, the democratic organisation provides the institutions and organisational context for individuals to maintain and pursue their fundamental freedoms, inalienable rights, and dignity; to manage organisations in democratic, participative, and cooperative ways; and to conduct business in considerate, balanced, and sustainable ways. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of management, organisation studies, strategic management, business ethics, entrepreneurship, and family business.

A democratic firm is a company owned and controlled by all the people working in it, just as a democratic government at the city or state level is controlled by all its citizens. This book is about the ideas, structures, and principles involved in the democratic firm and in economic democracy.

This book brings together experts from different areas to show how creativity drives design and innovation to allow the integration of a wider spectrum of topics related to engineering design, industrial design and ergonomics in design. It presents theories and best practices demonstrating how creativity generates technological invention, and how this, combined with entrepreneurship, leads to business innovation. It also discusses strategies to teach creativity and entrepreneurial competencies. Moreover, the book discusses the role of human factors in understanding, communicating with and engaging users, reporting on innovative approaches, new typographies, visual elements and technologies applied to mobile and computer interfaces developments. It also discusses innovative strategies for design education and sustainable design. Based on the AHFE 2020 Virtual Conference on Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and on the AHFE 2020 Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Communication of Design, held on July 16–20, 2020, this book offers a fresh perspective and novel insights for human factors researchers, designers, communicators and innovators.

The United Nations has declared 2012 to be the International Year of Co-operatives in recognition of the impact that co-operative enterprise has on more than three billion people across the globe. Co-operatives contribute to national and local economies in virtually every country by championing an ethical approach to business underpinned by internationally agreed values and principles. Yet despite the wide-ranging successes of co-operatives, in financial terms as well as in the development of sustainable communities, the study of these democratic forms of enterprise remains surprisingly absent from the curricula of most university business schools around the world. Designed primarily for undergraduate students, Democratic Enterprise provides an introductory-level analysis of democratic models of enterprise, namely co-operatives and employee-owned businesses. A supplement to any course that deals with these topics, it also stands alone as a template for academics who wish to incorporate material on democratic models of enterprise into courses relating to economics, business studies, sustainable development, enterprise, and organizational theory and behavior.

The "knowledge revolution" is widely accepted, but strategic leaders now talk of the logical next step: the human capital revolution and the need to manage knowledgeable people in an entirely different way. The organization of the future must be not only nimble and flexible but also self-governing and values-driven. But what will this future organization look like? And how will it be led? In this thoughtful book, organizational expert Brook Manville and Princeton classics professor Josiah Ober suggest that the model for building the future organization may lie deep in the past. The authors argue that ancient Athenian democracy was an ingenious solution to organizing human capital through the practice of citizenship. That ancient solution holds profound lessons for today's forward-thinking managers: They must reconceive today's "employees" as "citizens." Through this provocative case study of innovation and excellence lasting two hundred years, Manville and Ober describe a surprising democratic organization that empowered tens of thousands of individuals to work together for both noble purpose and hard-edged performance. Their book offers timeless guiding principles for organizing and leading a self-governing enterprise. A unique and compelling think piece, A Company of Citizens will change the way managers envision the leadership, values, and structure of tomorrow's people-centered organizations.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

What legitimizes power within a corporation? This question is of concern to the millions of citizens whose lives depend upon the fate of business corporations. The rules, institutions and practices of corporate governance define the limits of the power to direct, and determine under what conditions this power is acceptable. Effective corporate governance has long been defined in terms of economic performance. More recent studies have focused on philosophical, political and historical analyses. Entrepreneurs and Democracy unites these strands of inquiry - the legitimacy of power, the evolution of multiple forms of governance and the economics of performance - and proposes a framework for future study. It explores the opposing tensions of entrepreneurial force and social fragmentation that form the basis of legitimate corporate governance in modern societies. In doing so, it identifies a common logic that links both the democratization of corporate governance and the growth of economic performance.