All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Forging Economic Democracy: A Case Study of Workplace Diversity, Autonomy, and Reward
| Can worker-owned democratic businesses be viable economic institutions for an increasingly diverse workforce? The paper is an ethnographic study of a 30-year-old worker-owned cooperative that pays its 215 members well above industry standards while maintaining decentralized control and eschewing management. The organization, “One World Natural Grocery,” has also rejected its largely white, middle-class, educated roots and is now a widely diverse organization with a majority of working-class members. Against the literature claiming that decentralized democratic control requires member homogeneity and size limits that maintain face-to-face working relationships between all members, or else strictly representative structures to manage conflicting interests in a heterogeneous membership, this paper offers an analysis of how one organization retains participatory democratic control while growing and diversifying. The paper draws a strong connection between economic growth and its resulting stability, and the ability of the organization to recruit and retain its increasingly working-class and non-white membership. That such workplace heterogeneity and growth has not created crises of day-to-day or long-term cooperative control is explained by examining the organization’s densely clustered democratic processes. In exploring these specific mechanisms of direct democratic control in a larger workplace, this paper urges renewed scholarly attention to the potential of worker ownership and the value of direct democratic control.
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