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Collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives are known for requiring high levels of participation, striving toward community, and making space for affective relationships among their members. The emotional intensity of such organizations has long been considered both an asset and a burden: while personal relationships may generate solidarity and sustain commitment, interpersonal interactions can be emotionally intense and, if left unmanaged, can even lead to organizational demise. How do collectivist-democratic organizations manage emotions to create and sustain member commitment? This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a worker-run, worker-recuperated business in Argentina to analyze the emotional dynamics of a democratic workplace. First, the author shows how members of the cooperative engage in emotional labor not only in their customer service, but also through their participation in lateral management and democratic governance. An analysis of individual feeling management, however, provides only a partial picture of emotional dynamics. Drawing on the theory of interaction ritual chains, the author argues that workplace practices like meetings and events can produce collective emotions that are critical to maintaining members’ commitment to the group. Finally, the author shows how interaction ritual chains operate in the BAUEN Cooperative, tracing how symbols of shared affiliation circulate through interactions and are reactivated through the confrontation of a common threat. The author concludes by reflecting on implications for future research on emotions in collectivist organizations and participatory workplaces more broadly.

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory paper, the authors put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation – values, ownership, management, and social relations – and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, the authors situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

In some organizations action is taken to stimulate creativity and innovation. The right steps may have been taken, such as involving employees in decision making, recruiting and appointing employees who evidence characteristics of creativity, setting standards for work performance and giving regular feedback, yet creativity and innovation are hampered in some way. The culture of an organization may be a factor contributing to the extent to which creativity and innovation occur in an organization (Johnson, 1996; Judge et al., 1997; Pienaar, 1994; Shaughnessy, 1988; Tesluk et al., 1997; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1997 in Martins & Terblanche, 2003). The current organizational culture and the demands of creativity and innovation may lead to a conflict situation.

Libraries have faced many periods of grim economic realities. These periods of hardship have forced libraries to strive for more efficient organizational structures. Many of these improved organizational structures have been the result of mergers and/or consolidations. This phenomenological study describes the lived experiences of the merger design team of a large and complex library organization.

Results indicated the experience of the participants touched upon each of Bolman and Deal’s (2008) four frames: political, human resources, structural, and symbolic. The merger design team’s effectiveness on task is congruent with the model of team effectiveness proposed by Hackman (2002). Lastly, the role of underlying assumptions, espoused values and beliefs, and artifacts that makes up the organization’s culture falls within the parameters set forth by Schein (2004).

Individual interactions between partners are recognized today as playing a central role in the evolution of cooperative interorganizational relationships. Most theoretical treatments of interactions have been made at a macro-level, with reference to constructs such as trust, outcome expectations, process and outcome discrepancies, and communication. Relationships are analyzed at the level of organizations seen as collective actors, and their international aspects are reduced to the comparative analysis of macro-level dimensions of culture. In the past two decades, research in social science has progressively revealed the complex and multiple natures of culture and identity in organizations. Surprisingly, the monolithic vision of organizational and national cultures is still dominant in the strategy field and has tended to use organization-wide or nationwide classifications (one organization – one culture/one country – one culture) and seeing top managers as the most reliable source of information on the topic. The paper suggests substantial modifications in our approach to culture and argues that the mapping and codifying of different management styles and cultural dimensions may not be enough to understand the dynamics of international business encounters. The main issue is not the existence of differences per se, but rather the way behavioral differences are perceived and interpreted by members of other managerial/organizational/national cultures, and particularly how the interactions – the “contact” across these cultures – are socially constructed and managed. We propose a research agenda putting perceptions and communication processes at center stage and introduce the concepts of Communication and Cultural Dissonance – rooted in the field of cross-cultural management and intercultural communication – as an important factor in the development of cooperative processes. Perceptions of cultural differences and problematic behaviors are grounded in the different cultural interpretations of a proper way to communicate intent, relations and business strategies to be implemented. These respective and often divergent interpretations will be fundamental in the way individuals assess the quality of the cooperation process, the reliability of their partners and of the knowledge they want to transfer and the trustworthiness of the partner. We use data from a longitudinal study of several post-merger integration processes to illustrate some of our theoretical conjectures.

Diversity management is seen as a decisive factor for ensuring the development of socially responsible innovations (Beacham and Shambaugh, 2011; Sonntag, 2014; López, 2015; Uebernickel et al., 2015). However, many diversity management approaches fail due to a one-sided consideration of diversity (Thomas and Ely, 2019) and a lacking linkage between the prevailing organizational culture and the perception of diversity in the respective organization. Reflecting the importance of diverse perspectives, research institutions have a special responsibility to actively deal with diversity, as they are publicly funded institutions that drive socially relevant development and educate future generations of developers, leaders and decision-makers. Nevertheless, only a few studies have so far dealt with the influence of the special framework conditions of the science system on diversity management. Focusing on the interdependency of the organizational culture and diversity management especially in a university research environment, this chapter aims in a first step to provide a theoretical perspective on the framework conditions of a complex research organization in Germany in order to understand the system-specific factors influencing diversity management. In a second step, an exploratory cluster analysis is presented, investigating the perception of diversity and possible influencing factors moderating this perception in a scientific organization. Combining both steps, the results show specific mechanisms and structures of the university research environment that have an impact on diversity management and rigidify structural barriers preventing an increase of diversity. The quantitative study also points out that the management level takes on a special role model function in the scientific system and thus has an influence on the perception of diversity. Consequently, when developing diversity management approaches in research organizations, it is necessary to consider the top-down direction of action, the special nature of organizational structures in the university research environment as well as the special role of the professorial level as role model for the scientific staff.

There is still no universal definition of the third sector in Europe, but it can be seen as including all types of non-governmental not-for-profit entities such as non-profit organizations, mutuals, cooperatives, social enterprises and foundations. This article attempts to make sense of the current shifting conceptualization of the third sector in Europe. It is based on short country summaries of the images and concepts of the third sector in 13 European countries by EMES Network’s members, first presented in 2008 (Defourny and Pestoff, 2008; nine of them were recently revised and are found in the appendix to this article.). The perception and development of the third sector in Europe is closely related to the other major social governance institutions/mechanisms, like the market, state and community and through the third sector’s interaction with them. Moreover, many third sector organizations (TSOs) overlap with these other social institutions, resulting in varying degrees of hybridity and internal tensions experienced by them. TSOs can generate resources from their activities on the market, by providing services in partnership with the state and/or by promoting the interests of a given community or group. The country overviews document a growing professionalization of TSOs in most countries and a growing dependency of public funds to provide services. This has important theoretical and practical implications for orienting the articles included in this book. Thus, it can provide a key for better understanding the discussion and analysis in the remainder of this volume.

Developing an alternative and more realistic modeling of the firm, the key point of this paper is that workers cooperatives represent a form of corporate governance, which is a subset of the participatory organizational form, that constitutes a competitive alternative to the typical relatively hierarchical and narrowly controlled firms. An important component of the cooperative advantage lies in its capacity to increase the quantity and quality of effort inputs into the ‘production process.’ However, to do so incurs economic costs. Thus, cooperatives can yield competitive outcomes without driving out of the market non-cooperative organizational forms. To some extent, whether cooperative or other participatory solutions are adopted depends upon the preferences of economic agents since cooperatives are shown to be competitive even in an extremely competitive environment. However, dominant or not, the cooperative solution can yield higher social–economic welfare levels to members.