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theses

Cooperative organizations have the potential to issue a profound challenge to the status quo of the neoliberal political economy and dominant organizational paradigms. They go beyond the for-profit/not for-profit binary and open up spaces for socially grounded enterprise that help to complicate the dominant understanding of the economy. The dissertation explores two consumer food cooperatives in Philadelphia, PA. Both organizations were founded in the early 1970s to provide healthy, inexpensive food—and an alternative to market capitalism. Over the last 40 years, the organizations have taken different paths to achieve their aims: one has expanded to two stores with a subsidiary non-profit education and outreach arm, and a hierarchical management structure; the other has expanded too, but is operated by a staff collective and encourages a strong culture of member participation. Both have responded to an increase in popularity by abolishing mandatory member labor and redefining the terms of membership. Through semi-structured interviews, document analysis and participant observation, this study examines the ways these organizations adapt to change and narrate their organizational lives. It asks why and how each organization comes to embrace its particular logics and practices. By attending closely to the voices of the research participants, the dissertation sketches out three main themes with which consumer cooperatives struggle. The first is a “paradox of exclusivity,” whereby they seek maximal inclusion of the public in the cooperative experiment but must draw cultural and organizational boundaries to maintain coherence. The second is the struggle to maintain standing as community based organizations devoted to civic purposes while balancing the books as a thriving business. The third is cooperatives’ commitment to participatory democratic practice, an ideal that they strive to attain through their adherence to and interpretation of the international cooperative principles. This dissertation contributes an understanding of consumer cooperatives to the planner and community developer. It advances the literature on organizational theory as regards institutional logics and organizational narratives. Finally, it employs critical event narratives and a storytelling approach to advance the use of narrative methods in qualitative research.

ETD_4555

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Andrew William Zitcer

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000069016

doi:10.7282/T3SQ8XZ7

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.