The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organisational Democracy and Participation

By J. Allen Whitt and Joyce Rothschild

Book Overview

Over the last several years worker cooperatives of many kinds have sprung up all around the world. As a result, industrial relations in the workplace have changed dramatically as workers have come to own and run their own enterprises. This book provides evidence on how these new enterprises are functioning today. Using evidence from their extensive research in various such firms, the authors identify the consequences for both the organisation and the workers when those who do the work also manage. Setting forth an original theory of democratic organisations, they reveal the very real dilemmas and trade-offs that democratic work organisations face, as well as the specific conditions in which workplace democracy flourishes or declines.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521379423
• ISBN13: 9780521379427
• Release Date: June 1989
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The cooperative workplace

Kunda in his book explains that culture could be used as a powerful weapon that the organization uses against the workers to manipulate and finally control them, reaching the organization's goals. The author supports this idea through the study of the High Technologies Corporation (HTC) case, a "state of the art" company that designs, develops, manufactures, sells, and services a number of popular high-tech products. The company has been a high-tech success story through three decades of existence. According with Kunda, culture is a set of rules that support the relationship between the company and the people, specifically it is compound by rules for behaviors, thoughts and emotions. The conformation of this set is carried out by the interaction within workers and between the company, it means that each individual within the company could be affecting the organization culture (interactive effect). Kunda explains that the company sees the culture as a reengineering process, where it have to be redesigns and maintained to get the goals of the company. On another way, control is the effect to internalize and institutionalize the set of rules to get involve and part of the organization. Once obtained this level, the worker will be internally committed, strongly identified with company's goals, and intrinsically satisfied by his or her work; therefore, he or she will not need the company to be coercive with them to play his or her own role in the job. A company uses rituals as the machinery to model the culture. These rituals in HTC are conformed by structural speeches, presentations, meetings, lectures, parties, team and inter-group meetings and training workshops. Other elements used by companies are the myths; the company supports its message through a leader, who serves as model to follow. Finally, the common vocabulary is used to reinforce the identification of workers with organization's culture. An important dilemma that the employee faces is adopt or not adopt the organization's culture. Can they really have this choice? According to Kunda, some employees are alienating completely trough the culture, even losing their autonomy (marginal workers). Another workers are reluctant to adopt and intelligently simulate the internalization of culture or maybe draw a line to separate own culture and corporation culture. Both groups want really want to be part of the organization. In conclusion, culture is a mean to get corporation's goals and workers' convenience. In this sense the worker "choice" is to get involves or not with the trade-off to get high positions or not.