HOW MASON’S THEORY OF WORKPLACE PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY TIES
INTO “THE OFFICE.”
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, MASON’S THEORY OF WORKPLACE PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY 2
There are a lot of daily activities in the normal life of humans ranging from leisure to
work. In this case, these are dimensions that are critical to human life since they serve different
purposes, and as such, they are quite important. In this context, the different dimensions in the
life of a human being mostly depict or change the character of a person. However, one dimension
of interest is that of the work life of different people. This is an important element since it is
evident that people spend about a third of their day at work, and as such, they are subject to
interaction with other people in the workplace. Therefore, the aspect of participation in the
workplace can be taken as important since it shows how much contribution one has in their work
and has a lot of different turnout of events for the individual, both social and political.
Participatory and workplace democracy is a theory coined by Mason, which explains the political
and social spheres in the workplace in terms of liberalism. As such, this essay will demonstrate
how the theory ties to the tv show “The office.”
The office is an American tv series that started airing on NBC from March 2005 to May
2016. The tv show consists of nine seasons, and even though the first season was met with a lot
of criticism, the seasons that followed were acclaimed for the quality of content that they
contained. The tv show consists of different workers and mainly revolves around the work life of
the workers while focusing on their interactions with one another. Moreover, the tv show also
shows different reactions from the workers in accordance with how they handle different
situations in the workplace. Therefore, the tv show explains both the political and social spheres
of the lives of the characters and how the spheres interact with each other. This is presented by
the politics involved and how the social sphere controls the political lives of the people in the
workplace. As such, participation, as seen in the tv series, breeds involvement while
nonparticipation creates apathy, as shown by different characters (Mason, 1982).