Description
TitleDemocratizing work
Date Created2019
Other Date2019-01 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (363 pages : illustrations)
DescriptionRights won by workers through mass mobilization and collective bargaining, even when extensive, normally stop short of significant worker ownership or control of the firm. Worker cooperatives – businesses owned and controlled by their worker members – can, in theory, offer a radical organizational, legal, and ideological alternative to the hierarchical governance and worker dispossession characteristic of the modern firm. Yet whereas some ethnographic research has shown that worker cooperatives can preserve democratic control and accountability in the face of competitive pressures and corporatization, a number of studies have suggested just the opposite, finding that many worker members report feeling distant from the management of their cooperative and alienated from their work. Moreover, some observers argue that contrary to the assumption that cooperative workplaces should foster solidaristic and anti-capitalistic values, they can in fact promote individualism and a petit-bourgeois sensibility, and weaken labor solidarity. In-depth, semi-structured interviews with 32 members at a dozen worker cooperatives throughout England show that the British worker cooperative movement has cultivated a participatory, communitarian, and egalitarian legal consciousness and workplace culture that is undergirded by the institutionalization of democratic governance, common property, and equal wages. However, members feared that a lack of social support, combined with pressures to grow in order to compete with large and international firms, could compel their cooperative to compromise principles, lower standards, and lose their character. Analysis of the history of the British cooperative movement and evaluations of cooperatives by foundational political economists underline worker cooperatives’ enduring importance to – yet persistent marginality within – working class politics and socialist theory. By merging labor and capital rather than attempting to equalize them, and by socializing capital chiefly at the level of the enterprise rather than the state, worker cooperatives have appeared to work at cross-purposes with broader labor and leftist movements. Worker cooperatives however offer a tried-and-tested model of workplace democracy and economic equality that depends on the success of those movements for their own.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Albert A. Castle
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.