The Emergent Social Movement of Worker Cooperatives in the U.S.: Are these Social Enterprises?

IssueThere is a growing resurgent movement in the U.S. of cooperative economic activity on the part of low power, influence and resourced individuals and communities that challenges the common narrative of the scarcity of... [ view full abstract ]

Issue

There is a growing resurgent movement in the U.S. of cooperative economic activity on the part of low power, influence and resourced individuals and communities that challenges the common narrative of the scarcity of workplace cooperatives in the U.S. This movement is not typically framed in the context of work integration and social enterprise/entrepreneurship/innovation, but rather in the context of income inequality and opportunities for those excluded from the traditional economy, such as undocumented and documented immigrants.  The movement is buttressed by a supportive infrastructure of politically progressive intermediary organizations, academics, and professionals concerned with economic justice, but largely unaware of the similarities to the development of social enterprise social cooperatives.  On the other hand, there is recognition that the mostly Latin American immigrants are at least aware of some of the cooperative traditions from their countries of origin.  This research and paper explores the emergence of these cooperatives in the context of involvement in intersecting social movements, and explores their similarity with social cooperatives.

Methodology

This paper is based upon the authors’ research on the recent development of worker cooperative activity in New York City that includes community-based participatory, interview, and ethnographic research.  It is in the abductive research tradition (Swedberg, 2014; Tavory, & Timmermans, 2014) that is focused on building a conceptual understanding of this new activity in the U.S.  The data comes from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and documents from the cooperatives and support organizations.

Argument

      The current uptick in the formation of worker cooperatives in the greater New York City (NYC) area on the one hand appears to derive from progressive political activity focused on income inequality, including the Occupy Movement.  On the other hand the growth comes from the needs of undocumented and documented immigrants, and other stigmatized and discriminated workforce groups, to find non-exploitative work, especially in work conditions and decision processes.  This current worker cooperative activity looks very similar to the activity and models that in some other countries are called social enterprises (Rothschild, 2009).  Yet on the surface there is no connection on the part of the worker cooperatives with this parallel activity among social enterprises, nor is there awareness of this family resemblance.

      This research, by two social enterprise researchers who are also deeply imbued with feminist and anti-hierarchical progressive traditions, explores the development of current NYC worker cooperative activity to look at substantive similarities and differences, e,g, structure, and those that are more processual and attitudinal.  The research utilizes two initial lenses in this abductive study. Through a macro lens, we utilize social movement concepts, including resource mobilization, political process, new social movement, and strategic action fields (Fligstein, & McAdam, 2011).  Through a micro lens, we use job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) and collective identity to look at how participants in these new cooperatives view their participation.

Conclusion

            This is “in process” research that allows us to look at somewhat longer standing worker cooperatives and those in development.  One of the longer standing cooperatives, which has grown large, is facing the common issue of adopting a more hierarchical and bureaucratic form to deal with issues of size, complexity, and efficiency, and how this affects commitments to Rochdale Principles and other cooperative values.  The social movement framing of the research has uncovered useful processes that may also be fruitful in research on social enterprises, e.g., the segmentation of participatory roles (McCarthy & Zald, 1977).  Job crafting, to the knowledge of the authors, has appeared in only one other study of social enterprise (Walk, Greenspan, Crossley, & Handy, 2015).  It may prove to be a useful way to understand individual participation in social cooperatives.  The paper concludes with a discussion of how cooperative activity is framed in different political and economic environments, and what this might mean for survivability and diffusion.

Cited Work

Fligstein, N., & McAdam, D. (2011). Toward a general theory of strategic action fields. Sociological theory, 29(1), 1-26.

McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. American journal of sociology, 1212-1241.

Rothschild, J. (2009). Workers' Cooperatives and Social Enterprise A Forgotten Route to Social Equity and Democracy. American Behavioral Scientist, 52(7), 1023-1041.

Swedberg, R. (2014). The art of social theory. Princeton University Press.

Tavory, I., & Timmermans, S. (2014). Abductive analysis: Theorizing qualitative research. University of Chicago Press.

Walk, M., Greenspan, I., Crossley, H., & Handy, F. (2015). Mind the Gap: Expectations and Experiences of Clients Utilizing Job‐Training Services in a Social Enterprise. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 86(2), 221-244.

Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of management review, 26(2), 179-201.