Resisting the Tide: The Roles of Ideology in Sustaining Alternative Organizing at a Self-managed Cooperative

Abstract

This paper examines how organizational ideology can be collectively mobilized to sustain an alternative organizational form—a self-managed cooperative—in resistance to institutional prescriptions perceived as hostile. Based on an ethnographic study of the Venezuelan cooperative Cecosesola, we identify three roles through which ideology enables the reproduction of the alternative form over time: ideology as a mobilizing normative framework to justify resistance; as a cultural-cognitive framework to engage members and integrate them into the resistance project; and as a regulatory framework ensuring member compliance. However, we find that in parallel with sustaining self-management as an alternative form, mobilizing ideology may also paradoxically entail costs in terms of individual sacrifices, exclusion of members and reduction of group heterogeneity, leading to the creation of an authoritarian system. These findings shed light on the ideological drivers of institutional resistance and bring new insights to understand the challenge of sustaining self-management and other alternative organizational forms within a hostile institutional context.

Alternative leadership and the pitfalls of hierarchy: When formalization enables power to be tamed

“…Alternative, like mainstream organizations, are far from being exempt from new forms of control, or normative control (Barker, 1993; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Husted, 2021; Soetens and Huybrechts, 2022). From a system of rationalized normative rules initially designed to replace bureaucratic procedures of control (Barker, 1993) to a rhetoric which developed as an answer to cultural antinomies of Western industrial societies (Barley and Kunda, 1992), neo-normative control should not be underestimated, with its associated costs, such as the ignorance of responsibility to the future (Husted, 2021) or exclusion of members, reduction of the group’s heterogeneity and the creation of an authoritarian system (Soetens and Huybrechts, 2022). Therefore, power domestication is never achieved once and for all, and the balance of power is always precarious as contexts and relations evolve.…”

Platform cooperatives and the dilemmas of platform worker‐member participation

“…Given that PWCs are in the business of intermediation, their business model enables 'one-person microproviders' to carry out their activities outside of the PWC's physical, fixed establishments (Lehdonvirta et al, 2019), as consumers do not need to go to one of these establishments to procure a good or service. This is in contrast with many traditional worker cooperatives, such as worker-owned stores and funeral homes, which require physical presence within a set establishment belonging to the cooperative (Cornforth, 1995;Soetens and Huybrechts, 2023). It is only a subset of worker cooperatives, typically operating in the service (e.g., doula, homecare and taxi cooperatives) and cultural (e.g., artist) industries, that have workermembers which are largely untethered from a fixed, physical workplace.…”

More Than Prefigurative Politics? Redefining institutional frames to reduce precarity under neoliberal capitalism

“…Along the same lines, Reinecke’s (2018) study of Occupy Wall Street has shown how ‘over time deeply entrenched institutional inequalities frustrated participants’ attempts to maintain an exceptional and communal space’ (p. 1299). These analyses point to grassroots organizations’ difficulty of maintaining a space of ‘exception’, outside the institutions that govern them (Martí & Fernández, 2013; Soetens & Huybrechts, 2022). An organizational focus on their own internal practices ends up threatening their own existence and their ability to transform capitalist institutions and render lives less precarious in the long term.…”

“…Indeed, many grassroots organizations struggle to stay true to their own values and practices and to remain in existence, due to the multiple pressures they undergo to align with the institutions constituting society around them (e.g. Errasti, 2015; Reedy et al, 2016; Reinecke, 2018; Soetens & Huybrechts, 2022). These critiques alert us that, without contentious politics challenging existing institutional frames, prefigurative politics alone are likely to fail in their intent to move society towards a post-capitalist future (Miller, 2015; Zanoni, 2020).…”