Duality and dissonance in worker cooperatives’ management
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24215/23143738e078Keywords:
organizational conflict, worker cooperatives, cooperative dissonance, managementAbstract
Labor cooperativism is one of the main exponents of Economic Democracy in terms of theoretical elaborations and practical implementations. In this sense, worker cooperatives are conceived as organizations where, stemming from workers’ common ownership, egalitarian economic management is materialized based on the principle "one person, one vote," regardless of contributed capital. However, when it comes to putting this ideal into practice, inconsistencies arise since, although the space for governance and strategic delimitation—the Meeting of members—works in this way, most of the remaining areas of management usually adopt the typical bureaucratic chain of command scheme, as the arrangements in classic authority relations are considered unavoidable elements when it comes to achieving coordination in daily work. This is how the Cooperative Dissonance arises, a concept that refers to the dual and contradictory nature of the set of work experiences, ranging from the assembly meetings with democratic equality to the everyday work processes with autocracy and inequality in the distribution of decision-making power. The proposition of this dissonance in worker cooperatives’ management, its effects and the possible overcoming approaches represent the main contribution of this article.
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