Mary Parker Follett: an inspiration for our time.
| Author | Maddock, Su |
| Position | Profile - Her significance in three areas, building democratic processes, leadership, and ideas about complexity - Essay |
Mary Parker Follett was an outstanding public intellectual of her day, both in the USA and in the UK, and the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how much we can learn from her about democracy, leadership, participation, partnership and difference. She based her thinking on her own extensive experience, observation and reflection on community development; her ideas are profound, relevant and accessible for people interested in practising democracy today. In this article we show her continuing significance in three areas: building democratic processes; leadership; and ideas about complexity. (1)
Follett came to England from Boston, USA, in the early 1920s and immediately connected to those working on mutual societies and self-managed teams. She gave lectures to Joseph Rowntree managers and to a Rowntree sponsored series of workshops for works directors and foremen and women at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1932 she delivered the inaugural address to open the Department of Business Administration at the London School of Economics. Lyndall Urwick, who edited many of her lectures after her death, was a young Rowntree executive in 1926. He had just married, and initially did not want to spend his weekend at the Balliol event. After meeting her, he remembered: 'I was at her feet, and I stayed there as long as she lived.' Urquart described Follett as someone with 'a profoundly philosophical and scientific mind' (Urquart, 1949, xvi).
Building democratic processes
In Britain we talk a great deal about democratic deficit, but not about our understanding of what democratic relationships involve or how they develop: democracy is seen merely as the chance to vote. Mary Follett was far ahead of her time and was a pivotal thinker about democracy as a process and about the role of leaders in that process:
Democracy is not a goal, it is a path; it is not attainment, but a process ... When we grasp this and begin to live democracy, then only shall we have democracy. (Follett, 1918, p58) Follett wanted to rethink democracy not as representation but as an ongoing political process in which people are actively engaged. She saw the core of politics as the way people associate one with one another and democracy as an evolving process that develops when people organise together:
We shall only have democracy when we learn to produce this (association) through group organisation. (Follett, 1918, p384). She was highly critical of the way contemporary American political leaders understood democracy and of their lack of interest in resolving problems and differences. Her critique of the North American political system was grounded in her observations of 'carpet bagging' and vote rigging and her alternative vision was based on her extensive experience of...
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