Discourse democracy at work: On public spheres in private enterprises

This article presents an empirically based argument for what I have labeled ‘discourse democracy at work’. The idea of discourse democracy at work is launched to supplement the various representative models of democracy we find in European working life. Starting with a brief elaboration of the concept of public sphere, the article presents a number of reasons why all parties in working life can benefit from applying some kind of internal public spheres within private enterprises. The experiences gained over 20 years with an agreement between the labor market parties in Norway, on enterprise development based on broad participation from the employees, forms the basis for a more detailed presentation of how discourse democracy at work may be put into practice. The concluding section presents some principal arguments as to why a strategy for discourse democracy is particularly apt today — in a working life characterized by trends like increasing knowledge industries, individualism on the personal level and globalization on the societal level.