Reflections on the measurement of organizational democracy. Conceptual, epistemological, and methodological aspects

This chapter does not aim to review the enormous literature accumulated so far but rather focuses on the construct of Organizational Democracy (OD). Battilana (2018) provided a state‑of‑the‑art discussion on OD and its related concepts, such as hierarchy, self‑management, empowerment, and workplace democracy. Instead, this chapter has a methodological nature, attempting to propose measures to calculate a sort of Organizational Democracy Degree (hereafter, ODD), resulting from the combination of different variables that are supposed to vary from a minimum corresponding to a typical large capital‑based corporation to a maximum corresponding to a small cooperative. The lack of and need for appropriate and customized tools are, in different ways, also underlined by Sean Geobey in Chapter 8 and Daniela Venanzi in Chapter 21. Hence, the topic does not concern the legitimation or viability of a more democratic degree but rather how to calculate it and how to compare different organizations in this respect. In fact, as we will see, a large cooperative could be less democratic than its capital‑based specular form, that is, a firm of the same size working in the same industry but not owned by external (non‑workers) owners. Furthermore, because a single capital‑ or labor‑based firm could evolve over time toward a higher or lower ODD, it is important to acknowledge this from many different perspectives, including those of managers, unions, policymakers, and researchers.