A feminist analysis of the Basque Mondragon system of industrial cooperatives suggests that women fare somewhat better in cooperatives than in private firms in employment, earnings, and job security. Market phenomena and the family as basic economic unit affect women workers negatively, as does increasing professionalism in the technical core of the system. Similarities in gender stratification and segregation in capitalist, socialist, and cooperative workplaces call into question the ability of all three to deal adequately with gender equality. Full workplace democracy may depend on the distribution of goods and services based on need rather than work or the wage, socialization of homework and child care, degendering of technical and scientific knowledge, its dissemination as widely as possible throughout the workplace and the community, and the inclusion of all members of the community in major decisions. The article ends with modest suggestions for alleviating one pervasive problem in large industrial cooperatives—the concentration of technical and scientific skill among a few, primarily men.
Mondragon is known as a system of democratically structured producer cooperatives, yet the condition of women workers is only somewhat better, relative to men, than in capitalist or already existing socialist organizations. Three major factors appear responsible. First, waged or not, women have responsibility for the home. Second, a capitalist market devalues social goals. Third, and the primary topic of this paper, men control decisions about technology, commonly understood. As in other industrial settings, the manufacturing technology of the cooperatives, and much of their administrative apparatus, have origins in patriarchal military institutions. Engineering education, also with roots in military institutions, is one source of gender maintenance during times of technological transformation. This hierarchical organization of technology stands in contradiction to the ideology and core elements of cooperative structure.
A coordinated program for comprehensive care is a good approach to the management of the psychiatrically ill aged. Nevertheless, the patients, their families, community professionals, and the organizational patterns of many facilities and agencies offer a variety of obstacles to comprehensive care. These obstacles are discussed under the headings: 1) attributes of the patients, 2) patient‐family interactions, 3) attributes of professional caregivers, 4) adequacy of community resources and organization, 5) multidisciplinary interactions, and 6) attributes of the case coordinator. These categories are not mutually exclusive, nor do they exhaust the full range of the problems. Such a classification, however, helps to determine some of the major difficulties encountered by coordinators in implementing programs for comprehensive care.
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