ABSTRACT
I want, for reasons which will become evident, to use the phrase ‘the Democratic Firm’ in a very general sense to cover a wide variety of organizational forms. Indeed, it is useful to regard the extent to which a ‘firm’ is or is not ‘democratic’ as something like a variable (or set of variables) running ‘down’ from what we might reasonably regard as an ‘extreme-type’, perfectly embodying the principles of what I have elsewhere termed Rational Democratic Authority (RDA) (Abell, 1979), to what, I suppose, must be at the other extreme - the Autocratic Firm.
