Due to the cost of shipping and handling, ordering a single copy from your local bookstore or an online bookseller is often less expensive than ordering directly from us. Your local bookstore will appreciate having the ISBN 978-0-9792827-0-6 since there are many books with a similar title.

One Copy Shipped to an Address in the United States

Single copies are $30.00, which includes $5.15 for shipping by USPS priority mail. To order, Click Here.

One Copy Shipped to an Address in Canada

Single copies shipped to Canada are $37, which includes $12.95 for shipping by USPS Priority Mail. To order  Click Here.

One Copy Shipped Outside the United States and Canada

Single copies shipped outside the United States and Canada are $41, which includes $16.95 for shipping USPS Priority Mail. To order Click Here.

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

The DMOZ is not the Division of Motor Vehicles nor the Demilitarized Zone but it was certainly a land mine for the better part of my afternoon. The DMOZ is the Open Directory Project (ODP) founded in 1998 to build a directory of the World Wide Web—all the websites in the world. What does DMOZ stand for? I don’t know because when I clicked on About DMOZ, I was taken to About ODP.

(I later discovered that DMOZ is a project of Mozilla, the group that brought us Netscape, the first web browser. Directory Mozilla?)

I’m assured by WooRanks (another long story) that if I can get Sociocracy.info listed, it will improve its page ranking in all the search engines in the world. “An ODP listing in the DMOZ will improve our SEO.” (How’s that for a Saturday?)

Getting Sociocracy.info into the DMOZ is a noble venture, however, good for the future of sociocracy,s because the DMOZ is also attempting to categorize directory listings and to judge their worthiness. No purely marketing or copycat sites need apply. Everything is tidily organized. But there I watched the remainder of my afternoon sink into eternity. The first step to submitting an application is to choose a category. Have settled myself once more into the stick-to-the-basics-name of “sociocracy,” rather than Dynamic Governance or Direct Democracy or anything else more pleasing to the American ear, I am still confronted with the “What is it?” question that in this instance requires a one word response, a category name.

The DMOZ today contains 5,005,675 sites and has 94,395 editors who organize the listings into over 1,010,167 categories. I was certain to find the perfect place for Sociocracy.info.

First consideration: Should sociocracy be under Society or Social Sciences.  When I clicked on Society, I was confronted with possible subcategories of Government, Organizations, Philosophy, and Politics, which were listed along with Activism, Economics, Lifestyle Choices, Subcultures and Work. The distinction between “Govern-ment” and “Govern-ance” was nowhere to be seen. You govern citizens or you govern nothing.

Society > Organizations led to actual organizations working in the areas of Advocacy, Education, Parenting, etc. No organizational theory sites. Sociocracy.info is not itself an organization so I clicked on.

it didn’t fit Philosophy because that category led to topics: Aesthetics and Ethics, and the like. The Philosophy of Mind. I tried Political Philosophy but that led to Anarchism, and the dreaded Socialism. Libertarianism? That led to Anarcho-Capitalism. The Occupy movements would be there next. It didn’t feel like sociocracy which isn’t just a political theory anyway.

Social Sciences looked most promising because it led to management Science. Good, I thought. Perfect. Sociocracy is a Management Science that can be applied to any kind of organization. All organizations need management. But when I clicked on Management Science, I was ejected out of the Social Sciences category into Business where Management sits along with Accounting, Customer Service, and on and on.

I tried to just go with Social Sciences but the fine print said it was for academic websites only. Those that are research oriented, code words for “college professors and their academic departments.” They own the field, I guess and the DMOZ probably thinks “Who else would care?”

The best fit in terms of near neighbors was Democracy because all the sites listed there were challenging the same notions that sociocracy challenges, but none had any solutions. None were offering a better decision-making method or any scientific basis for developing a better government for anything. While I believe sociocracy is in fact what democracy could be, that it accomplishes the aims of democracy better and more broadly, actually calling it democracy felt like quicksand.

This clicking on categories and following possible choices went on and on, just as this post is about to do. No other entry containing  ”sociocracy” surfaced on the search engine, so I couldn’t take the easy way out and stick with someone else’s forced choice. I was in uncharted waters.

I sent in an application to be listed under Management Sciences, still frustrated that sociocracy only fits under business. The lesson was a revealing one, however, because it highlighted the “What is Sociocracy?” problem more clearly. Sociocracy, by being more than democracy, has no category. Or no single category. And still no elevator speech.

DMOZ image by permission of Wikipedia.

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

[theme-my-login]

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

Please fill out and submit the form below to request or provide information. If appropriate, I will respond as soon as possible.

Sharon Villines

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

Your request subscribe to Sociocracy.info updates is confirmed. You may manage your subscription options by clicking on the link to your profile in the box in the far right menu or in the upper right corner of the page.

If this was an error or  you have changed your mind, please use the following form to change your subscription:

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

Discounts on Orders of 9 or More Books

Whenever possible we make books available to study circles and workshops at a discounted price. Shipping costs, however, have become prohibitive. The most economical number to ship is 9 copies because they fit into a flat rate USPS priority mail shipping box. If you need more you may contact us for costs or order multiples of 9.

9 Copies Shipped to One Address in Canada

 $200 (Includes $33.00 for shipping), a 25% discount off the single copy price. To Order, please Click Here.

9 Copies Shipped to One Address Outside the United States and Canada

$216 (Includes $48 for shipping), a 25% discount off the single copy price. To order, please Click Here.

If you need more than 9 books shipped to one address outside the United States, please click here to contact us for costs.

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

There were most often 30+ members in meetings, even when there were many more members in the organization. Since members valued each other’s contributions equally, they would not have considered forming smaller circles. People wanted to be together. Most of the groups used rounds as the best way to give everyone time to speak. If someone dominated, someone else would ask them not to. Anyone might do this, not necessarily the facilitator.

These groups varied in their objectives. One was starting and operating a cooperative school. Another a food coop.  There were faculty groups, church groups, women’s consciousness-raising groups. Women’s rights organizations including NOW and others whose names I’ve forgotten. More than one cohousing community.

Even when groups were required to use Parliamentary Procedure, as various incorporated groups were, they often used the first decision-making option — the discussion continued until the chair could declare a proposal passed by acclamation, or “no objections.” They also created ways to weight the votes, giving the group most affected by a decision half the votes so no one could impose a decision on a minority.

Inclusiveness

In these groups, inclusiveness was and is a pervasive value. Because inclusiveness in everyday life requires consensus, consensus becomes a practice, not just in formal decision-making process restricted to meetings.

For organizations accustomed to consensus decision-making, what sociocracy brings to governance  is a governance structure that is based on the consensus decision-making process. It uses a structured consensus, or delegated overlapping consensus. Consent of Circle A can be maintained in Circle B without all the members of Circle A participating because Circle A and Circle B overlap. Equally important is that the ways in which they overlap have the consent of both circles.

Representatives in democratic governance systems are normally elected by majority vote which means only a majority of those voting may support them, and far fewer of those they represent who didn’t bother to vote. Representatives elected by consent have been elected because they are trusted to speak for everyone. Sociocracy allows an organization to grow in an organized way, forming specialized units and still maintaining inclusiveness.

Consensus is a decision-making process but sociocracy is a governance method. Few of the groups that used consensus in the 1970s and 80s were able to grow beyond 50 or so members and still be united or effective without sacrificing inclusiveness. There was no way to extend consensus decision-making to very large groups or groups performing multiple or complex tasks. Specialization was impossible because there was no way to be one organization with many heads. They inevitably disbanded, broke into smaller groups, or adopted the conventional board of governing decision-makers who could value inclusiveness but not practice it.

Sociocracy is a method of governance that can ensure inclusiveness, effectiveness, and harmony even in large corporations.

“Behavior is determined by the prevailing form of decision-making.” Gerard Endenburg

Related articles

• Consent & Responsibility (adeeperdemocracy.org)
• Lost Valley Intentional Community, Eugene, Oregon (adeeperdemocracy.org)
• Tyranny of the Majority? Occupy Seattle (losthighwaytimes.com)

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

Today, the Court has enthroned corporations, permitting them not only all kinds of special economic rights but now, amazingly, moving to grant them the same political rights as the people.

United States Bill of Rights

Constitutional law expert,

The movement to reserve the rights ensured by the US Constitution to citizens and stop them from being awarded to corporations is rapidly gaining steam. The legal standing of corporations as people began in 1886, in the famous case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company in which the court based its arguments on the Constitution in denying Santa Clara County the right to right to tax property unfairly assessed for taxes. This decision was the beginning of a long string of decisions that accorded corporations as legal entities the same rights as persons. The problem is that corporations have no personal conscience. They are legal entities with no sensibilities. Their boards, executives, and managers can act on under shelter of the corporation with legal impunity. A corporation that controls a town and all the jobs in it, can close its factory with no personal sense of obligation or legal responsibility to the people it employs. It can destroy a town.

This was not always the case. When the corporate charter was established legally it had term limits. The corporation had to apply to the state in a given number of years in order to continue conducting business as a corporation. The State, acting on behalf of the people, could refuse to renew the charter of a company that was not acting in the best interests of a community and withdraw the special rights of corporations to protect their investors from personal responsibility. The investors could continue to operate as a business but they would be liable for their actions.

Today corporation can claim the people’s inalienable rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association, and all such other rights of the people. But there is no there there. Corporations a shifty giants with enormous power for which no one can be held accountable. They have more money and power than local governments.

The People’s Rights Amendment seeks to correct this. It reads as follows:

Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this Constitution intend the rights protected by this Constitution to be the rights of natural persons.

Section 2. The words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected State and Federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.

Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.

To sign a petition supporting the People’s Rights Amendment to the US Constitution:

http://www.peoplesrightsamendment.org/

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

Sociocracy is a method of producing harmonious organizations that value each person equally. Its methods are designed to produce self-optimizing systems that are effective and productive. Its principles and methods are derived from:

• the best modern management theory and practices,
• the Quaker tradition of peace education and the valuing of each person, and
• the science of communications and control, cybernetics.

Some people are drawn to the sociocratic circle method or dynamic governance simply because it is based on the best science available and others because it implements that values of the Quaker tradition: integrity, equality, community, simplicity, and peace.

The Beginnings: Monarchies Are Gone, Now What?

The sociocratic idea of using something other than autocratic power to govern complex societies began in the mid-19th century when Europe and America had emerged from monarchies and the struggle to develop alternatives was…, well, still a struggle. With very few exceptions, monarchies were replaced with autocracies of one kind or another. Sometimes the autocrat was a single person and sometimes a class of people. Sometimes benevolent and sometimes oppressive. By the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that the democratic ideal on which the United States of America had been founded, and which was operative in many other counties in one form or another, was not producing equal representation for all people. Workplaces were still autocratic, often brutally so.

In the search for a more intelligent society, the word “sociocracy” was first used by French Philosopher Auguste Comte, a leader in establishing sociology as a formal study. He called for a society governed by sociologists who could balance humanism and critical analysis to set social and economic policy by using scientific methods and not personal power.

The root word for both “sociology” and “sociocracy” is from the Latin, “socius,” which means associate or companion. Sociology is the study of companions or social groups. Sociocracy is governance by companions, or society as a whole.

While others besides Comte spoke of a sociocracy, notably renowned American Sociologist Lester Frank Ward, there were no attempts to establish a sociocracy.

The First Sociocracy

It wasn’t until WW II began to engulf Europe, that the first practical application of a sociocracy was established. Before the war, Dutch Educator Kees Boeke and his wife, English Educator Beatrice Cadbury, had been active internationally in Quaker peace education, predominantly in the Middle East, particularly Palestine. When his efforts to convince Hitler to adopt more peaceful methods failed, he was deported from Germany. The Boeke’s returned to Bilthoven, a small community near Utrecht, in The Netherlands. Needing a school for their children and to continue teaching, they started the Children’s Community Workshop and began applying Quaker egalitarian principles to its governance. Even when it grew to 400 students in 1945, the teachers and students continued to work together as equals to develop and manage the school, making decisions by consensus.

Although confined to the Netherlands and arrested by the Germans, Kees Boeke continued to write about the abuses of power that were becoming evident in democracies. His most well known essay is “Sociocracy: Democracy as It Might Be.”

A Sociocracy for Business

It was a graduate of the Boekes’ school, Dutch Engineer Gerard Endenburg, who discovered how to implement sociocratic ideals in the governance of a large organization in a competitive, results-oriented context. Endenburg’s family owned an electrical engineering company and in 1968, he became managing director. As an engineer, he found it frustrating that he could design remarkably successful electrical and mechanical systems but in managing people, it seemed impossible to produce satisfactory results for everyone—managers, workers, and investors. He knew from his own experience and the Boekes’ teachings that everyone’s needs had to be addressed in order to create a highly productive organization. Anything else was self-defeating.

While teaching radar technology in the Army, Endenburg had become interested in cybernetics which studied the ways that systems self-regulate, how they manage themselves successfully by self-correcting in response to a changing environment. Could cybernetic principles be applied in business?

In 1970 Endenburg reduced the size of his company from 160 to 100 employees and began using it as a laboratory to experiment with a new way of managing a business. His goal was to produce the environment of harmony and self-directed achievement that he had experienced at school. The same negative spirit of competition that he had found in the university and in the army, he found intolerably counter productive in his business.

Over the next few years, step by step, Endenburg developed the sociocratic circle method based on the now famous four principles: consent decision-making, circles of equivalent persons for policy making, double linking between circles, and consent elections to functions and tasks.

After ten years of experience with implementing ideas, evaluating the results, making corrections, and starting over again, Endenburg had developed a revolutionary method for organizing and managing businesses, associations, and even civic organizations. His method was more than ideas as Comte’s and Ward’s had been, and more than Boekes’ school with its important but limited goals of group support and personal achievement. In a demanding, fast-paced business Endenburg had produced an organization that was, harmonious, self-regulating, and highly successful, that could be replicated.

In 1995 when Endenburg stepped down as managing director, the company, still at 110 employees, had an annual income of fl 14 million, approximately US $5.6 million.

The First Sociocratic Centers

In 1978 Endenburg had established the Sociocratisch Centrum in Utrecht (now in Rotterdam) and began consulting with other organizations that wanted to implement the sociocratic circle method. He also began training consultants who travelled to The Netherlands to study with him and joined the faculty of the school of business at the University of Maastricht.

Sociocracy Today

Endenburg continues to be active in both the Centrum, as a consultant, and in decisions related to the growth of sociocratic organizations world-wide. They include national and international associations, building and manufacturing companies, health care services, public school systems, villages, private schools, Buddhist monasteries, software companies, residential communities, colleges, a wholesale florist provider, veterinary offices, and consulting firms.

There are consultants working internationally to help organizations implement the method, and a growing number of publications and websites. A network of sociocratic organizations, including SocioNet in the United States, is being formed to increase general awareness of sociocratic principles and methods.

(Note: Socialism, which advocates centralized ownership and distribution of wealth by the state, is unrelated to sociocratic thought.)

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations

In 1972 with a group of parents forming a cooperative school, predominantly young Yale faculty members who had moved to town to join a new college. We were committed to diversity and having a hard time recruiting people of color and from a different socio-economic class.

We were having an equally hard time finding appropriate space that we could afford. This was long before charter schools so we were funding the whole thing ourselves. We had been offered a space in a Presbyterian church in the center of the city, just where we wanted to be. We had had hours of discussion. Everyone consented to accept the lease except one very young African American single mother. No one wanted to either pressure her to consent or disregard her opinion or to lose her from the group. We had met several times in the previous two weeks and were exhausted, ready to take anything. It was after midnight when we finally agreed to sleep on it and meet again the next night.

After the meeting as we all went to our cars the conversations were about what we would do if she didn’t change her mind. No one agreed with her reasons but some thought we should give up the space in order to empower her personally and prove that we were serious about diversity. Others found this condescending and patronizing.

When we reassembled the next night, everyone was tense and not meeting each other’s eyes. We started the round with the young woman. She said she was willing to respect the group’s decision but still felt strongly that it would be a mistake.

One by one, every person in the room sincerely agreed with her. The space was in the basement of an all white church that was fairly conservative. Most parent cooperative schools then had been started in reaction to segregation or the teaching of evolution in schools. We would be reinforcing that view of our school if we chose that space — even though we would have a separate entrance and an address on another street. Even though we were going to be an open school and had hired teachers with fairly radical ideas, there would also be pressure to conform. It wouldn’t be a long term home and would be a bad start.

The self-assured optimism of the educated elite that believed it could change the minds of anyone with their successful progressive school and rational arguments, no matter how different their values, had melted overnight into her realism. She knew from her experience and her perspective that these people wouldn’t change — they liked who they were and it was a church where they had full control. They would be more than we could bear when we were still so new and untested.

We found other space shortly afterward.

One thing I’ve learned is that few groups are willing to spend the amount of time and listening required to work out this level of consensus. Perhaps in cohousing the aims are too diverse. Pre-move-in the task is huge and complex but the aim focused. We set aside our other aims. After move-in, all the personal aims we had deferred reemerge and exist in one place. With 65+ adults, there are a lot of aims. People with strong personal aims elsewhere don’t have that much the time or energy to spend on community aims unless they consciously make and preserve room for them.

Sociocracy.info - How to Design Fair and Effective Organizations