Changing Perspectives on the Problems of Democracy, 1970 to 2020: An Organizational Approach

In this short essay, originally presented at the Center on Organizational Innovation’s COI@25 25th Anniversary Conference, I discuss a number of predominant perspectives on the singular problems posed by liberal democratic polity over the last 50 years. I first provide an overview of the differing conceptions of the “problems of democracy” that have emerged and shifted since the 1970s. I then turn to an alternative, organizational approach to democracy, as a means of both understanding the genesis of, and relations between, predominant perspectives on the problems of democracy since the 1970s, and of analyzing democracy in the contemporary in terms of organizational innovation and failure.