The Cooperative Workplace
Potentials and Dilemmas of Organisational Democracy and Participation

This book provides evidence on how worker cooperatives are functioning today.

Joyce Rothschild (Author), J. Allen Whitt (Author)

9780521379427, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 June 1989

232 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.35 kg

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.

Introduction
Part I. Origins and Types of Alternative Organizations: 1. Cooperatives in the late twentieth-century: the democratic impulse and the challenge of oligarchy
2. The organizations studied, the methods used
Part II. A Theory of Democratic organization: 3. The collectivist organization: an alternative to bureaucratic models
4. Internal conditions that facilitate collectivist-democratic organizations
5. External conditions that facilitate collectivist-democratic organizations
Part III. The Significance of Democratic Organizations: 6. Democracy and individual satisfaction
7. The future of cooperation
8. Overview and conclusions
Notes
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Employee-ownership & co-operatives [KJVW]