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Book part
Publication date: 24 March 2021

Stéphane Jaumier and Thibault Daudigeos

Past research on collectivist-democratic organizations has attributed their distinctiveness to their socio-political goals and democratic decision-making and largely ignored their…

Abstract

Past research on collectivist-democratic organizations has attributed their distinctiveness to their socio-political goals and democratic decision-making and largely ignored their work processes. This ethnographic study examines how such organizations resist alienating forms of work even in the face of direct competition with for-profit companies. It focuses on Scopix, a French cooperative sheet-metal factory where the first author spent one year as a shop-floor worker. Cooperators there developed various practices to retain an emancipatory dimension to their work, regularly putting forward “craft ethics” as a counterweight to the sheet-metal industry’s drive to rationalize work processes. Drawing on the sociology of worth, the authors analyze how these practices emerged from the arrangements that workers made between the industrial world on the one side and the domestic and inspired worlds on the other. This study contributes to the literature into two main ways. First, the authors refine the sociology-of-worth framework by conceptualizing the emancipatory dimension of work as the result of ad hoc arrangements between different worlds. Second, the authors highlight the need for the literature on collectivist-democratic organizations to increase its focus on work, introducing the concept of work degeneration as a step in that direction.

Details

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-989-7

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 1 June 2017

Stéphane Jaumier, Thibault Daudigeos and Vassili Joannidès de Lautour

The purpose of our article is to contribute to the further understanding of individual responses to pluralism, by studying in particular the role played by critiques and…

Abstract

The purpose of our article is to contribute to the further understanding of individual responses to pluralism, by studying in particular the role played by critiques and compromises in the formulation of such responses. Drawing on theoretical insights from the sociology of conventions, we look at the various modes of justification publicly advanced by French co-operators when engaging with co-operative principles. Our analysis allows us to identify three main instantiations, that is situated and flexible enactments, of these principles: pragmatic, reformist, and political. Our contribution to the understanding of pluralism and its instantiations by organizational members is threefold. First, in contrast with studies drawing on an institutional-logics perspective, our study shows that individual instantiations of pluralism rely not only on positive affirmations of logics but also on critical mobilizations of competing logics. Second, our study shows that pluralism can be understood not only as co-existing multiple logics, but also as different possible instantiations of the same logic, the ambiguity of which allows compromises to be settled with other logics. Third, we suggest that organizational members’ responses to pluralism often involve more than two logics, which are combined into a complex set of interdependent judgments. In addition, in relation to co-operative studies, our proposed typology provides a mapping that usefully extends the range of possibilities found in co-operators’ instantiations of co-operative principles, thus furthering our understanding of the diversity of the co-operative movement.

Details

Justification, Evaluation and Critique in the Study of Organizations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-379-1

Keywords

Content available

Abstract

Details

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, vol. 12 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1832-5912

Book part
Publication date: 24 March 2021

Katherine K. Chen and Victor Tan Chen

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations…

Abstract

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.

Details

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-989-7

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 March 2016

Stéphane Jaumier

While a comparative study of the literature on accounting as a profession and on cooperatives reveals important differences in the values embodied by certified public accountants…

Abstract

Purpose

While a comparative study of the literature on accounting as a profession and on cooperatives reveals important differences in the values embodied by certified public accountants and by cooperators, the purpose of this study is to explore whether such differences lead to an insurmountable incompatibility or may possibly be mitigated and eventually overcome.

Design/methodology/approach

The study focuses on a French public accounting firm’s project to become a worker cooperative. Drawing on methodological insights from actor–network theory (ANT), the study analyses a situation in which the certified public accountants try to convince some cooperators of the merits of their project.

Findings

The case studied suggests that accounting as a profession and cooperatives are irreconcilable. It not only confirms that some of their contrasting features (identified in the literature) are indeed too difficult to overcome but also reveals a new, unforeseen source of tension between certified public accountants and cooperators.

Research limitations/implications

The study calls for further research into the so-far-overlooked relationships between accounting as a profession and cooperatives. It also proposes to extend the usage of ANT in accounting research to the study of accounting as a profession.

Originality/value

While ANT-inspired accounting research has to date shown a dominant interest in successful translation processes, the present study looks at an unsuccessful translation stage.

Details

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, vol. 12 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1832-5912

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 1 January 2013

Thibault Daudigeos, Amélie Boutinot and Stéphane Jaumier

Institutional pluralism is an intriguing phenomenon for institutional scholars. How the balance among logics evolves within a field and what kind of trajectories a set of logics…

Abstract

Institutional pluralism is an intriguing phenomenon for institutional scholars. How the balance among logics evolves within a field and what kind of trajectories a set of logics may experience over a long-term period remain unclear. In particular, extant literature tends too often to downplay institutional complexity by focusing on two dominant logics, and to ignore modes of interaction among logics other than competition. In order to address these issues, we offer a novel methodology for measuring institutional complexity – multiple institutional logics and their change. In particular, we highlight the utility of descendent hierarchical classification models, and demonstrate their relevance by analyzing articles published in a leading French trade journal over more than 100 years to study logics related to workplace in the construction industry. We identify a pool of six field-structuring logics over a period of one century; they reveal the composite nature of such logics, which we characterize as combining several higher institutional orders. Additionally, our results bring to light new mechanisms that can explain the composition of institutional logics.

Book part
Publication date: 1 January 2013

Thibault Daudigeos, Amélie Boutinot and Stéphane Jaumier

Institutional pluralism is an intriguing phenomenon for institutional scholars. How the balance among logics evolves within a field and what kind of trajectories a set of logics…

Abstract

Institutional pluralism is an intriguing phenomenon for institutional scholars. How the balance among logics evolves within a field and what kind of trajectories a set of logics may experience over a long-term period remain unclear. In particular, extant literature tends too often to downplay institutional complexity by focusing on two dominant logics, and to ignore modes of interaction among logics other than competition. In order to address these issues, we offer a novel methodology for measuring institutional complexity – multiple institutional logics and their change. In particular, we highlight the utility of descendent hierarchical classification models, and demonstrate their relevance by analyzing articles published in a leading French trade journal over more than 100 years to study logics related to workplace in the construction industry. We identify a pool of six field-structuring logics over a period of one century; they reveal the composite nature of such logics, which we characterize as combining several higher institutional orders. Additionally, our results bring to light new mechanisms that can explain the composition of institutional logics.

Book part
Publication date: 24 March 2021

Carla Young

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic…

Abstract

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.

Details

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-989-7

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 24 March 2021

Abstract

Details

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-989-7

Content available
Article
Publication date: 20 February 2017

Abstract

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 30 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

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