Gerard Endenburg (born 1933) is a Dutch entrepreneur, who developed the
Sociocratic Circle Organisation Method (SCM), which is a decision-making method for governing and managing organizations and societies based on
equivalence and draws inspiration from
cybernetics
Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with ...
. Endenburg was inspired by the idea of
sociocracy
Sociocracy is a theory of governance that seeks to create psychologically safe environments and productive organizations. It draws on the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussion and decision-making by people who have a shared ...
of
Kees Boeke.
Biography
Endenburg was born in
Rotterdam
Rotterdam ( , ; ; ) is the second-largest List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city in the Netherlands after the national capital of Amsterdam. It is in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, part of the North S ...
in 1933.
He was a
Quaker
Quakers are people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations. Members refer to each other as Friends after in the Bible, and originally, others referred to them as Quakers ...
, and attended a Quaker boarding school, the
hildren's Community Workshop where he was influenced by Kees Boeke and his wife Betty Cadbury and the ideas of sociocracy.
The school involved students in consensus decision-making.
He became general manager of his family's engineering company, Endenburg Elektrotechniek BV, in the mid-1960s, and in the 1970s started pioneering and applying the sociocratic method of organizing within the company.
[Quarter, J. (2000) ''Beyond the Bottom Line: Socially Innovative Business Owners'', Greenwood Press, p. 53-66.] In 1978, Endenburg founded the Sociocratic Center Netherlands to develop and implement the sociocratic approach in other organizations, serving as its director.
In 1992, Endenburg obtained a doctoral degree from the
University of Twente
The University of Twente ( ; Abbreviation, abbr. ) is a Public university, public technical university located in Enschede, Netherlands.
The university has been placed in the top 170 universities in the world by multiple central ranking tables. ...
, based on his dissertation ''Sociocratie als Sociaal Ontwerp'', translated into English as ''Sociocracy as Social Design''. Endenburg was an honorary professor in Organizational Learning at
Maastricht University
Maastricht University (abbreviated as UM; ) is a public university, public research university in Maastricht, Netherlands. Founded in 1976, it is the second youngest of the thirteen List of universities in the Netherlands, Dutch universities.
In ...
.
Bibliography
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See also
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Thesis circle
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Endenburg, Gerard
1933 births
Businesspeople from Rotterdam
Living people
University of Twente alumni
Dutch Quakers