A final contrast between classical organizations and pragmatist alternatives returns us to the opening theme of this essay: their relation to democracy. A fuller treatment would have to sketch in detail a pragmatist democracy, tracing the role of the legislature, administration and judiciary in a polity that deliberately governed itself by framework laws intended to be revised in the light of diverse efforts to implement them (Cohen and Sabel, 1997, 2003; Dorf and Sabel 1998; Sabel and Simon 2004. Here I only want to indicate how pragmatist institutions invert the very features of classic hierarchies that made them an encumbrance on, if not an outright obstacle to democracy: If the class organization reasonably occasioned pessimism about the prospects of democracy, then in its networked mirror image should, all else equal, occasion optimism about a democratic revival.
In classic theory, we saw, the routines of the large organization were the bane of democracy. Whether rooted in actual technical necessity, or imposed as technical necessities through the manipulations of self-interested, technically versed elites, these routines so limited individual and group autonomy as to reduce self rule to the periodic power to change one set of rulers for another. Hence public school became (for Dewey) a kind of incubator of citizen autonomy, a last-ditch defense against the encroachment of the elites, while the idea of a universal language of design was (for Simon) a fanciful means of connecting fundamentally disparate technical elites, and allowing them at least to communicate with the masses.
But in the pragmatist organization, we saw, the questioning of routine at the level of individual projects and more generally has itself becoming institutionalized. In this sense the lesson of the Deweyian school and the world of work surely overlap, even if they are surely not identical: In both rule following elides with rule making, and individual autonomy is explicitly linked to group decision making. Reform of the current, bureaucratic public school system on pragmatist lines further blurs the distinction between education and other forms of problem solving. Meanwhile Simon’s language of design has been transformed in pragmatist institutions from a forlorn, academic hope into an everyday necessity: the many, interconnected protocols of iterated co-design are in effect so many (partial, but intercommunicating) design languages, allowing actors with diverse expertise, and different background assumptions not only to exchange ideas jointly but also to develop new tools for mutual understanding. More yet: in assuming all current expertise to be importantly limited, and hence the corresponding need to develop corrigible institutions through peer review and local experimentation informed by lay knowledge, pragmatist institutions directly challenge the traditional equation of efficiency with rule by unquestionable professionals and technical experts. By their nature, therefore, these institutions invite the individuals and group that together form civil society to participate in new ways in the decisions that shape their lives. Long aware of the limits of principal-agent governance in volatile circumstances, and increasingly aware of emergent, alternatives that allow for institutional learning in the absence of master plans, mayors and local administrators—in Denmark, for instance (Sørensen, 2002)—and high civil servants and cabinet level politicians—in, for example the Netherlands (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 2004)—are beginning, but only just, to think openly about the implications of a shift to pragmatist public problem solving for parliamentary democracy (Engelen and Ho, 2004).
Sidney Hook, one of the great philosophic wits of the last century, famously quipped that pragmatism was good in theory, not so good in practice. But his is almost surely not the last laugh. The deep surprise of the current organizational revolution is that pragmatism institutionalized—put rigorously into practice—for once, in the reality of our own time, seems to be confounding our inveterate theoretical pessimism, expanding our capacities for problem solving while inviting us to exercise our capacities for self rule.
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