Democratic Theory

By means of qualitative analysis, this paper examines the organisational cultures underlying three worker cooperatives in the San Francisco Bay Area. 20 workers were interviewed and the transcripts were subsequently analysed along Edgar Schein's cultural framework. The findings show that overall the culture of these worker cooperatives is people-centred: the wellbeing of the workers comes first and the concern for making a profit comes only second.

Cooperative development efforts over the last 25 years have been largely inspired by, and modeled on, the Mondragon experience in the Basque region of Spain. None of these efforts has achieved nearly the success of Mondragon, which stabilized and dramatically developed a regional economy through the creation and growth of a diverse set of industrial worker and supportive secondary cooperatives. US efforts in cooperative development have typically replicated some aspects of the Mondragon model but ignored others.

To what extent do workers exert control within the workplace, and exercise voice in how the income generated by firms is distributed? And do they have ownership—not just in an affective sense, but in terms of share holdings or membership rights? The financial crisis opened up widespread discussion about prevailing modes of economic organization. But, for the most part, this discussion has been quite narrowly bounded, oscillating between two familiar poles. This paper tries to contribute to such a conversation by offering a macro-comparative backdrop.

This is a PowerPoint presentation delivered at the 2013 Beyster symposium in La Jolla, CA. It accompanies item 072, the conference paper of the same title.