This paper uses data collected through written narratives, focus groups and participant observation in three small UK worker cooperatives to investigate the role of democracy in maintaining cooperatives’ dual social-economic characteristic and resisting degeneration. More speciically it argues that ongoing processes of individual-collective alignment, understood as central to the practice of democracy, help cooperatives to balance varying and at times conlicting needs and aims, and challenge the assumptions underpinning the degeneration thesis.
While understood as central to cooperatives’ identity and mission their dual characteristic, which conceives social and economic goals as interdependent, leads to an ongoing challenge to balance these often dilemmatic goals, and associated actions and practices (Somerville, 2007; Novkovic, 2012; Puusa, Monkkonen and Varis, 2013). his poses risks of degeneration (Cornforth, 1995; see also Diamantopoulos, 2012; Chen, Lune and Queen, 2013; Doherty, Haugh and Lyon, 2014) that are heightened by an economic context which promotes managerialism and “market-based solutions to social problems” (Eikenberry, 2009: 585). he degeneration thesis claims that worker cooperatives will inevitably succumb to external forces and the impact of internal characteristics (such as the development of informal hierarchies based on personality traits or length of member involvement) “to adopt the same organisational forms and priorities as capitalist business in order to survive” (Cornforth, 1995: 1). his claim is born from the perceived primacy and extension of the free market and private enterprise into all areas of social life; the promotion of competition and hierarchical, bureaucratic forms as a means to success and eiciency; and the assumption that individual interests will prevail over those of the collective (Burkett, 2011). Literature on the degeneration thesis draws clear connections between degeneration and organisational form (Somerville, 2007; Ng and Ng, 2009). Expanding on this connection Chen, Lune and Queen (2013) explain that organisational forms carry with them certain values. In doing so the authors recognize that cooperatives’ democratic form is both essential to resisting degeneration and a point of vulnerability. In line with this view, Heras-Saizarbitoria (2014) and Somerville (2007: 15) argue that the risk of degeneration is heightened by the separation of values, organisational form and daily practice, and by the “weak exercise of internal democracy”.
Add new comment