>>What do you think how did self-management work? Meetings, meetings, meetings. It was a system where anyone could participate in pretty much any decision making process - at workplace, local community or various other segments of life. How so? Because there were too many of those places, and they couldn't get enough people to take part in all of them :). So, we all had to become, to some extent, professional meeting attenders. Which then surprised me when I came here - I thought it was OUR meetings which were too frequent, too long, too much under the influence of professional disputants or professional meeting organizers (who wouldn't know how to do their job, but know how to organize a meeting about it)... and then I saw what a bunch of amateurs we were.
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>I was joking of course, but your insights are very interesting. I'm going to ask some friends of mine this weekend who I usually meet. They are from a variety of different countries. It's not something we've discussed before so I'm interested to find out if their view is similar to yours. Given the debate tonight, I imagine most of the discussion will be politics and the financial disaster. They all can sit around chewing the fat for hours and hours. It's actually quite enjoyable :o)

Back to the subject - today I went to pick our youngest from after school (thanks to overall situation, there are fewer activity buses for the magnet program, so she'd have to wait more than an hour, and then that bus would have to drive at least a dozen miles to deliver everybody - would make for about 13 hours of school, so dad.drv instead). On the way we came to the subject of this "...and the example better be perfect or else...", and she was completing my sentences all the time. She has the same experience with her schoolmates.

But I'll try to get more on the subject (if I only know any proper keywords - it may have been searched and researched already) before forming any hypothesis. My hunch is that there's something different in the cultural patterns, in upbringing, but it's just a hunch, nothing palpable.