The Small Group and Participatory Democracy: Comment on Graebner

I believe Professor Graebner (1986) has made a well‐designed intervention to manipulate us readers into a rather one‐sided understanding of some of the blends of Deweyian education, social group work, Lewinian applied group dynamics, and industrial personnel work that lived side‐by‐side and were intermeshed in the practices of many professional and “amateur” (e.g., parents) practitioners. Although some of this mixture that he calls “democratic social engineering” includes the ideas of “objects of control” and group decision with a predetermined influence objective, for many others it includes the idea of coparticipants in a problem‐solving process in which, as Douglas MacGregor formulated it, “the member will be open to influence from the leader to the degree he perceives the leader is open to influence from him.” In other words, it assumes reciprocity of influence, with an emphasis on listening, seeking, and using feedback from each other as peers and member‐leader relations. Mary Follett, Edward Lindeman, John Dewey, and Kurt Lewin all subscribed to this basic assumption about the meaning of interpersonal democracy. And the National Training Laboratory (NTL) was founded on these tenets. Accordingly, I believe several issues of social influence dynamics are somewhat confused in Graebner's paper.