Revisiting self-managing organizations: Insights from Mary Parker Follett

Other conference contribution, 2022

The interest in self-managing organizations has grown steadily in the past decade as indicated by the rising number of popular management books that explore ‘new ways of working’ based on ‘progressive’ or ‘liberated’ organizations like Semco, W.L. Gore, Buurtzorg and Zappos. A new field of research is emerging that examines these self-managing organizations as ‘a novel organizational form’ characterized by their ‘radical decentralization of authority’ (Lee and Edmondson, 2017), focusing on the structural characteristics that set these organizations apart from others. In this paper we propose an alternative perspective for exploring these organizations; based on the relational process philosophy of Mary Parker Follett and a review of the most influential practitioner-oriented books in the ‘new ways of working’ movement, we suggest that what unites these organizations is processual worldview and a profound belief in the capacity of all people to act intelligently and creatively given the right conditions. We argue that Follett’s conceptualization of group organizing and integrative attitude offers an appropriate foundation for developing a language to describe a processual, relational worldview that underpins a collaborative, participatory process of self-governance that could better support the exploration of the practices of organizations in the ‘new ways of working’ movement.