Stream 17

Worker coops’ power for commoning futures

Stream leads: Isabel Faubert-Mailloux (Réseau COOP), Valérie Michaud (ESG – UQAM), Mirta Vuotto (University of Buenos Aires)

Stream Committee: Isabel Faubert-Mailloux (Réseau COOP), Valérie Michaud (ESG – UQAM), Olivier Rafelis de Broves (Laval University and Réseau COOP), Mirta Vuotto (University of Buenos Aires)

Description:

As the overall theme of the 2025 ICA conference puts forward, transformative changes are urgently required for more justice, equity, sustainable ecosystems and democratic organizations. This resonates with many recent calls formulated amid the manifold crises – ecological, social, economic, democratic – we experience. With a specific focus on work and labour, one such call has crystallized into the Democratize Work Manifesto (Le Manifeste travail, 2020 for the initial French edition). Coordinated by Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana and Dominique Méda, the manifesto urges us to radically rethink the way we work and organize. Three associated shifts are proposed: the democratization of organizations (“democratize”), the decommodification of work/labour relations (“decommodify”), and a commitment to environmental sustainability (“depollute” or “remediate”).

In this research stream, following the Democratize Work Manifesto, we aim to explore worker coops’ transformative power, especially for what we label our commoning futures. Indeed, while we believe cooperatives of all types can play a role in the required shifts, worker coops, together with worker-majority coops, can be conceived as living labs to democratize work, as “spaces of possibilities” where workers can experiment with new models of relationships and participation (Kokkinidis, 2015). Further, worker coops allow us to treat work as a commons and “labour power as a collectively and sustainably managed resource for the benefit of society” (Azzelini, 2018),

Through the decision power, profit-sharing and collective property rights they grant to their worker members, worker coops fully allow them to imagine and experiment with alternative organizing practices. How do such practices resonate with the three-fold Democratize Work Manifesto? We invite researchers and practitioners to join us into a conversation on how worker coops can democratize, decommodify and/or depollute/remediate. Examples of the questions that animate our research stream include (but are not limited to):

• Democratize organizations:

  • How can worker coops transform management and governance structures to encourage and sustain more worker participation? What innovations can they bring to strengthen worker members' voices in decisions? What models are in place, and why do worker members choose them? What are the advantages, but also challenges and potential darker sides of horizontal models (for instance, Soetens and Huybrechts, 2023; Jaumier et al, 2019)? How do cooperatives innovate to prevent or solve the “iron law of oligarchy” (Michels, 1915), the “iron cage” of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1978; Bager, 1994) and “democratic degeneration” (Meister, 1984), thus preserving democratization efforts? Opening up to the consideration of multistakeholder coops, what are their specific ownership and governance structures? Could multistakeholder models democratize coops, and with what risks or effects on workers who share decision-marking power?

• Decommodify work/labour relations:

  • How do worker coops transform work relationships and labour process? What principles and values orient labour decisions in worker coops? Inspired by feminist ethics of care (e.g. Tronto, 2009; Gilligan, 2019), how can they reduce (or not) the commodification of work by placing members and community well-being at the center of their decisions and practices? Beyond internal work organization, what transformative role can worker coops endorse in their broader socio-political context regarding labour/industrial relations? How can their organizational innovations at a micro level convert into institutional innovations at a meso or macro level, thus contributing to work decommodification?

• Depollute/remediate:

  • What innovative initiatives have worker coops implemented to minimize their environmental impact and promote energy transition? What strategies are in place to prioritize social and environmental value over financial profit? How can worker coops participate in the circular economy (Ziegler et al., 2023)? Can relations be drawn with the degrowth movement? What would a cooperative economy look like, and how would it address and solve the current ecological challenges, in comparison to the actual highly financialized capitalist economy?

Proposals should align with one or more of these three subthemes and can be submitted in English, French or Spanish. We are open to theoretical and empirical propositions and welcome research from diverse perspectives, from graduate students to experienced researchers as well as from practitioners.

References:

Azzellini, Dario (2018). “Labour as a commons: The example of worker-recuperated companies." Critical Sociology, 44(4-5): 763-776.

Bager, Torben (1994). “Isomorphic Processes and the Transformation of Cooperatives." Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 65(1): 35-59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8292.1994.tb01505.x.

DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell (1983). “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." American Sociological Review, 48(2): 147-60. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095101.

Ferreras, Isabelle, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda (eds.) (2020) Le Manifeste travail: Démocratiser, démarchandiser, dépolluer. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Gilligan, Carol (with Laugier, Sandra, Patricia Paperman, and Annick Kwiatek and Vanessa Nurock for the translation) (2009). Une voix différente [In a Different Voice] : La morale a-t-elle un sexe ? Paris: Flammarion.

Jaumier, Stéphane, Thibault Daudigeos, Isabelle Huault, and Vincent Pasquier (2019). "La démocratie organisationnelle autrement-L’exemple des hiérarchies à domination inversée." Revue française de gestion, 45(278), 19-36.

Kokkinidis, George (2015). "Spaces of possibilities: Workers’ self-management in Greece." Organization, 22(6), 847-871.

Meister, Albert (1984). Participation, associations, development, and change. Transaction Publishers.

Michels Robert (1915/2001). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. Original 1911 in German: Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie; Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens. Transl. Paul Eden, Paul Cedar 1915. Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books.

Soetens, Aurélie and Benjamin Huybrechts (2023). "Resisting the Tide: The Roles of Ideology in Sustaining Alternative Organizing at a Self-managed Cooperative." Journal of Management Inquiry, 32(2), 134-151.

Tronto, Joan C. (Maury, Hervé and Liane Mozère for translation/foreword) (2009) Un monde vulnérable. Pour une politique du care. Paris: Éditions La Découverte.

Ziegler, Rafael, Thomas Bauwens, Michael J. Roy, Simon Teasdale, Ambre Fourrier, and Emmanuel Raufflet (2023). "Embedding circularity: Theorizing the social economy, its potential, and its challenges." Ecological Economics, 214, 107970, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107970.