Doctoral Dissertation Research: Worker-Recovered Businesses and Workplace Inequality

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines how organizations construct and maintain equality in the workplace. Despite the important contributions made by studies examining the workplace as a site where social inequalities are produced and reproduced, recent scholarship has begun to consider proactive efforts to address workplace inequality, highlighting the need for more research on the workplace as a potential site of social change. This project examines the possibilities and limitations of worker cooperatives as a means of addressing persistent workplace inequalities. The project will document and explain efforts to create more equitable distributions of power and resources in the workplace and the implications these efforts have in alternative workplace organizations (like cooperatives) and conventional organizations. To examine how and whether work organizations can proactively reduce inequality, this project examines workplace inequality in worker-recovered businesses in Argentina, companies that have been converted from privately-owned enterprises into worker-controlled cooperatives. These businesses provide goods and services like their traditional counterparts, but operate under a different ownership arrangement, authority structure and operating logic. Concretely, this project will analyze organizational practices around pay, authority, participation and work processes used by four worker-recovered businesses operating in the service sector. The first three -a health clinic, hotel and school - are "first generation" worker-recovered businesses. We will study the organizational history of each WRB by conducting in-depth interviews and historical research. The purpose of these cases is to examine efforts to redistribute power and resources over a longer period of time. These three cases will be supplemented by a fourth much younger organizations in an early transition stage. The aim of this case is to observe the construction of organizational practices as they emerge in real time and space. Together, the analysis of the four field sites should highlight the problems and prospects of worker-recovered businesses and cooperatives for altering workplace power and authority relationships.