| Blog Post Published on: | 26th October 2022 |
| Title: | The Cooperative Workplace |
| Lead Author: | Joyce Rothschild |
| Type of Blog Post: | cooperative_movement |
Here’s a very interesting and scholarly book on co-ops and organizational democracy.
The cooperative workplace: Potentials and dilemmas of organizational democracy and participation.
by Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt
first published in 1986
It’s mostly about the potential for producer coops to organize around the principles of direct democracy – which, as the book explains, are very different from those of representative democracy.
The authors do not focus on consumer cooperatives or the economics of the patronage refund. Nevertheless, their book is a very scholarly assessment of producer coops, and a good deal of their research indirectly reflects on consumer coops as well.
First I will provide the book’s table of contents and, after that, the full text of the introduction.
Introduction
Part I – Origins and types of alternative organizations
Part II – A theory of democratic organization
Part III – The significance of democratic organizations
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At least since the 1911 publication of Robert Michels’s Political Parties, the process by which organizational democracy yields to oligarchy has been accepted – however regretfully – as inevitable. Organizations with no bosses and no followers, organizations in which all members have an equal say in running things, have largely escaped the notice of organizational analysts. Though democratic organizations have long existed, detailed study of has been displaced by the assumption that they are fragile, short-lived structures or that they will eventually come under the control of one or a few leaders, thus losing their defining characteristic. This expectation has become a cornerstone of twentieth-century social science.
Today in the United States we are witnessing the birth and life of scores of grass-roots organizations – organizations calling themselves “collectives,” “cooperatives,” and “alternative institutions” – that aspire to be radically democratic in purpose and practice. These organizations provide us with a unique opportunity to take a fresh empirical look at the supposed inevitability of oligarchy and bureaucracy. This book examines the nature, possibilities, and limits of direct democracy in such organizations. We develop a theory of democratic organizations and show how this theory is applicable to a broad range of directly democratic and related organizations.
This subject is relevant to anyone who would hope to live and work in a democratic society; it is relevant also to anyone who has written off the possibility of organizational democracy as utopian. These anomalous organizations reject bureaucracy and attempt to fashion an alternative, providing a natural laboratory for evaluating long-held assumptions about the universality of hierarcy and bureaucracy. To the extent that these organizations succeed, they promise to broaden our theory of organizations and to provide concrete models of alternative organizational practices.
Grounded in empirical observation of collectivist organizations in many different domains, this book has two major theoretical aims. The first is to try to construct a systematic, defintive model of the organizational properties of collectivist or cooperative organizations. We define a collective or a cooperative as any enterprise in which control rests ultimately and overwhelmingly with the member-employee-owners, regardless of the particular legal framework through which this is achieved. [1] It is the priority given to democratic methods of control that is the essential characteristic of the contemporary cooperative. Since the right to govern rests ultimately with the collectivity of members and delegated authority is accountable to the group as a whole, members also call their enterprises “collectives.” In the ninteenth century lexicon, these enterprises would have been called “producers’ cooperatives.” The term remains technically correct but the participants themselves seldom use this designation. [2] Although the terms collectives, cooperatives, and, more recently, alternative institutions have been used historically to denote a range of organizational types, we are interested in the central characteristic they all have in common – direct, democratic control by the members. For this reason, we often use these designations interchangeably.
The second theoretical goal of this work is to discover those conditions that undermine or support the most essential characteristic of cooperative decision-making procedures based on particpatory democracy.
Cooperatives are important organizations. Throughout their long history in the United States and Europe, they have formed the cutting edge of movements for social change and organizational innovation. They also carry forward and attempt to put into practice long-held dreams of people, dreams with deep roots in the social theory and philosophy of Western society. They are thus organizations that look both to the past and the future. Part I of the book examines the origins of alternative organizations and shows how they are one strand of a broad social movement currently producing several related types of democratically oriented workplaces.
In spite of the historic legacy of cooperatives, they are not organizations of a bygone era. The United States is currenly experiencing the largest and most vital burgeoning of cooperatives in its history. Yet, ironically, we know next to nothing about cooperatives, particularly the specifics of their internal structures, processes, and conditions of operation. The case studies that exist are often descriptive and idiosyncratic. Mainstream organizational theory and research have almost entirely ignored these organizational forms. Ecological studies of the distribution and duration of cooperatives reveal general democratic patterns but little of their internal functioning. We are sorely in need of a theoretical model for understanding collectives and cooperatives as organizations. In Part II, we attempt to construct a general theory of democratic organizations. Chapter 3 begings the section by detailing the structural features that define the democratic organization.
Nothing is more central in the values of Western society than the ideals of democracy and equality. Visions of direct democracy can be traced back to ancient Greece, resurfacing in many subsequent eras. Yet organizational democracy has been an elusive goal, rarely achieved in practice and chronicled mostly in the breach. The most interesting thing about cooperatives is that they are attempting to achieve something most social science tells us is impossible: viable participatory democracy. Our research on cooperatives convinces us that although they do not always succeed, neither do they always fail. We argue that the creation of organizational democracy is conditional. In Chapters 4 and 5 of Part II, we identify specific conditions, some internal in the organization and other external, appearing to favor, or in their absence to undermine, organizational democracy.
In discovering these conditions we hope to advance organizational theory and help to clarify matters for cooperative members. Cooperatives, like all organizations, embrace multiple and often competing goals. The desire for internal democracy, though central, is usually coupled with other legitimate goals. The nexus of these goals places the cooperative in numerous binds. For every condition we identify as supporting democracy, we show the structural dilemma this condition raises for the organization.
We hope this book will help both organizational theorists and practitioners in cooperatives to identify the organizational features essential to the collectivist form, the conditions that promote direct democracy within the organization, and the inherent trade-offs that go with the pursuit of democracy. Identification, however, will not make the necessary choices any easier for members.
Part III draws out the general significance of organizational democracy for the individual and society. In Chapter 6 we examine not only our own cases, but the existing research literature on worker satisfaction in cooperative-type organizations. Here we reach some unexpected conclusions concerning the effects of democracy on the individual member. Chapter 7 looks at the future of democratic organizations and specifically asks how the perform economically vis-a-vis more conventional forms. We consider what the role of government may play in their development, and what kind of evolution and life span we may expect of them in view of historical precedents. The final chapter provides a more philosophical overview of how autonommy and democracy in the workplace may help to transform the relationship between work and play.
As the first step in the analysis, it is necessary to understand the origins and nature of contemporary cooperatives. They are radically different from conventional organizations not only in their form and aims, but also in their unique intellectual and historical roots. For this reason, Chapter 1 begins by pointing out how certain classical ideas have shaped contemporary cooperatives. Included in these are the writings of Rousseau, Bakunin, and Marx. Consciously or unconsciously, members of cooperatives try to put into practice these venerable ideas. However, according to the work of Weber and Michels and the considerable body of research and theory following from their tradition, the prospects for organizational democracy are extremely remote. This tradition forces us to take seriously the forces of bureaucratization, specialization, and oligarchization confronting would-be democratic organizations. Chapter 1 therefore also examines the Weber/Michels challenge, and then looks at the cultural and economic forces that have favored the rise of the recent wave of cooperatives in the United States. Chapter 2 describes the specific organizations that we have studies and the analytical methods we have used.
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