Workplace Democracy, Ch. 8, p. 234

In chapter 8 on page 234, Deetz outlines four steps toward workplace democracy in which shared decision making among stakeholders is crucial.
1) Create a workplace in which every member thinks and acts like an owner.
2) The management of work must be reintegrated with the doing of work.
3) Quality information must be widely distributed.
4) Social structure should grow from the bottom rather than be reinforced from the top.
The fourth step resonates with me when I think of how social media networking is being used in the workplace and for that matter in the marketplace. Instead of the traditional top-down communication, social media networking is a bottom-up approach to communication. For instance, when I worked at IBM, the company utilized the software they developed and sold to consumers internally for employee communication. For instance, IBM’s Websphere Portal was utilized for the company’s intranet. Each employee had a profile based on what organization, department and job title they participated in. Based on that information, the end user’s main pages displayed the pertinent content and information for that employee profile at a company level. However, the employee can then further define their profile and add various functionalities based on their special interest or job specifications to have even more refined content displayed. This included access to newsgroups where communication or discussion threads were started, answered or discussed by various employees throughout the company. The types of subjects discussed ranged from technical questions about certain products to options on how certain company procedures could be modified. These discussions threads were monitored and sometimes distributed or directed to the appropriate people to change or knowledge experts to answer. This is the type of bottom-up affect a social media network has on workplace democracy.