Introduction: Democracy Disorganized?

Jonathan Bach

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/21095

Authors

Jonathan Bach Global Studies, The New School, New York

Jonathan Bach is a Professor of Global Studies and Interim Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School in New York. He is the author, inter alia, of What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (Columbia University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Re-Centering the City: Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity (with M. Murawski, UCL Press, 2020) and Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (with M.A. O’Donnell & W.Wong, University of Chicago Press, 2017).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/21095

Keywords:

Democracy, technology, accountability, organizational form, inequality, power

Abstract

This article introduces three essays in the Focus section on “Problems of Democracy” adapted from the 25^th Anniversary Conference of Columbia University’s Center on Organizational Innovation (COI). It argues that an ongoing shift in the organizational form of society from mass to network production and communication requires a new set of questions around the organization of democracy. Specifically, democracy’s core function of connecting power to accountability is shown through these essays to be increasingly dis-organized by this shift, necessitating new ways of addressing this old problem.

References

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Introduction: Democracy Disorganized?

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