Though it won’t find a warm reception in many corners of corporate America, there’s evidence that workplace democracy is catching on among more than the counterculture types at places like Equal Exchange. WorldBlu’s list includes GE Aviation’s plant in Durham, North Carolina, which built the jet engines for Air Force One, and has a workforce divided into teams that make most decisions by “open consensus,” soliciting opinions from all members and not proceeding until every one agrees on a course of action.

That the Bay State should be so well represented among WorldBlu’s honorees is hardly surprising. After all, our founding rabble-rousers kick-started American democracy right here. Adherents of the new movement see the workplace as simply another institution in need of revolution. “Boston has a long democratic legacy,” North says. “It’s a little sad we even have to do this, 200 years later.”

As far-fetched as a connection between the shot heard round the world and the drone of the copy machine might seem, North isn’t the only one making it. Cambridge social theorist Frances Moore Lappé argues that workplace democracy is beneficial not only for employees, but also for society as a whole. In her 2005 book, Democracy’s Edge, she contends that for our government to function properly, citizens must have representation in all areas of their lives: school, church…and yes, the office. “If we spend our entire day as serfs basically just following orders,” she says, “how can we be expected to be problem-solvers in our families, our communities, and our nation?”

WorldBlu’s Fenton started thinking about workplace democracy when she spent several months as a college student in Indonesia, where she was struck by the lack of freedom under the Suharto regime. After graduation, she took a job as an account executive at a “media company that shall remain nameless,” and was amazed by the similarities. “It was a one-way monologue where management told me what to do. It was sort of a punch to the gut.” Fenton resigned after four months. Though she would later do a stint working in the belly of the beast—the NASDAQ stock market—an activist had been born.

Based on what she’s learned through her research, Fenton argues that the principles and practices that qualify a workplace as democratic—including transparency, decentralization, fairness, and accountability—can be good for the bottom line. “If you look at the organizations on the list, every single one of them is an industry leader,” she says. That’s probably a bit generous. Equal Exchange, it’s true, is a leader in the fair-trade coffee field, and has been ranked among the Boston area’s fastest-growing companies three times in the past decade, expanding 700 percent in that time to nearly $25 million in sales—but it hardly has Starbucks quaking in its clogs.

And wider adoption of workplace democracy faces an uphill climb, according to Thomas Kochan of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Kochan is sympathetic to the movement’s goals—he authored a book titled Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families’ Agenda for America—but pessimistic about its broader prospects. Democratic workplaces “are very anti–American business culture,” he says, adding that almost all of the organizations on WorldBlu’s list “are younger and come out of private ownership and aren’t subject to hostile takeovers and buyouts and pressure from investors.”

Still, with the traditional champion of the working man and woman—labor unions—on the ropes, there’s an opportunity for workplace democracy to gain a wider following. Worker co-ops have proved an effective business model in Europe, where Spain’s Mondragón cooperative corporation employs 70,000 people in 150 separate firms. And closer to home, in rural New England, agricultural collectives like Cabot and Ocean Spray are owned and operated by family farmers. Perhaps the moment has arrived for the idea to take root in the American office park as well.