Organizational Imaginaries
Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
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- Description
- Contents
- About
Our everyday lives are structured by the rhythms, values, and practices of various organizations, including schools, workplaces, and government agencies. These experiences shape common-sense understandings of how 'best' to organize and connect with others. Today, for-profit managerial firms dominate society, even though their practices often curtail information-sharing and experimentation, engender exploitation, and exclude the interests of stakeholders, particularly workers and the general public.
This Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or conceptions of organizational possibilities, with a focus on collectivist-democratic organizations that operate in capitalist markets but place more authority and ownership in the hands of stakeholders other than shareholders. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees:
- Emphasize social values over profit
- Are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders
- Employ democratic forms of managing their operations
- Have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments
Organizational Imaginaries explores how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. By ensuring that organizations ultimately support and serve broader communities, collectivist-democratic organizing can move societies closer to hopeful 'what if' and 'if only' futures. This volume is essential for researchers and students seeking innovative and egalitarian approaches to business and management.
Winner of the inaugural 2022 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.
Chapter 1. “What If” and “If Only” Futures beyond Conventional Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Imagining Collectivist and Democratic Possibilities for Organizing; Katherine K. Chen and Victor Tan Chen
- Part I: Working: Enacting Collectivist-Democratic Practices through Everyday Interactions
- Chapter 2. The Emotional Dynamics of Workplace Democracy: Emotional Labor, Collective Effervescence, and Commitment At Work; Katherine Sobering
- Chapter 3. Resisting Work Degeneration in Collectivist-Democratic Organizations: Craft Ethics in a French Cooperative Sheet-Metal Factory; Stéphane Jaumier and Thibault Daudigeos
- Part II: Networking: Connecting Communities through Collectivist-Democratic Practices
- Chapter 4. Moral Community as a Yardstick for Alternative Organizations: Evaluating Employee Ownership and Its Place within the Socioeconomic Order; Jonathan Preminger
- Chapter 5. The Iron Cage Has a Mezzanine: Collectivist-Democratic Organizations and the Selection of Isomorphic Pressures via Meta-Organization; Carla Ilten
- Chapter 6. A Matrix Form of Multi-Organizational Hybridity in a Cooperative-Union Venture; James M. Mandiberg and Seon Mi Kim
- Practitioner Perspective:
- Chapter 7. Economic Democracy, Embodied: A Union Co-op Strategy for the Long-Term Care Sector; Sanjay Pinto
- Part III: Reworking: Challenging and Transforming Capitalist Economies through Collectivist-Democratic Practices
- Chapter 8. Organizational Infrastructures for Economic Resilience: Alternatives to Shareholder Value-Oriented Corporations and Unemployment Trajectories in the U.S. during the Great Recession; Marc Schneiberg
- Chapter 9. It Takes More Than a Village: The Creation and Expansion of Alternative Organizational Forms in Brazil; M. Paola Ometto, Asma Zafar, and Leanne Hedberg
- Chapter 10. Ownership and Mission Drift in Alternative Enterprises: The Case of a Social Banking Network; Jason Spicer and Christa R. Lee-Chuvala Epilogue
- Chapter 11. Participatory Democratic Organizations Everywhere: A Harbinger of Social Change?; Joyce Rothschild
Katherine K. Chen is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY.
Victor Tan Chen is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University.