Building ‘Critical Performativity Engines’ for deprived communities: The construction of popular cooperative incubators in Brazil

Abstract

Although worker cooperatives offer an organizational model that critical management scholars could adopt to demonstrate the utility of their normative ideals, little is known about how academia can contribute to the creation of worker cooperatives. Building on the concept of performativity and the case of the Technological Incubators for Popular Cooperatives in Brazil, we provide an account of constructing incubators for worker cooperatives across multiple universities. Our study uncovers the challenges that scholars face in performing the model of worker cooperatives by cognitively embedding actors within both economic and cooperative principles through teaching. Our results clarify the role of feedback loops, knowledge circulation, and the building of ‘chains of translation’ in the concrete manufacturing of worker cooperatives, and we show how universities can help develop a multilevel, flexible, and complex support network that enhances the performativity of the worker cooperative model. We advance the concept of a ‘critical performativity engine’ to describe the process whereby the first method for incubating cooperatives was developed and then translated across settings.

Critical Essay: Reconsidering critical performativity

“…But success meant the first ITCP supported the development of several workers' cooperatives, and operated as a proper 'critical performativity engine' enabling the design of new cooperatives (Leca et al, 2014). The ITCP published in 1998 the 'Incucoppe' method as 19 a handbook, a practical 'tool-kit' for designing other cooperative incubators.…”

“…An exception is Brazil's ITCP in which critically engaged scholars moved from theorization to engagement within the material realm, through supporting the development of workers cooperatives for remote and deprived communities (Leca, Gond and Barin-Cruz, 2014). Growing violence in the favela surrounding the campus of the Foundation Oswald Cruz (Fiocruz), culminating with bullets striking the wall of the foundation's main building, pushed academics to engage with the social issues undermining their neighbourhood, and stimulated the idea of recasting a 'ventures incubator' training for future capitalist entrepreneurs into a 'cooperatives incubator' supporting the development of cooperatives that would serve the needs of the most deprived communities (Leca et al, 2014). According to the web-site of the pioneering ITCP from the The first incubator required the designing of specific sociotechnical arrangements that would build and transmit knowledge about management and politics, notably by developing technical toolkits.…”

Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Business Ethics: Converging Lines

“…This could entail that Pragmatist Critical scholars are directly and actively involved in their own university, for example in employee councils, work groups and departmental meetings; that they apply Critical pedagogy in their classes whenever possible or necessary, for example by discussing different paradigms and bringing in Critical perspectives in mainstream business, economics and accounting courses and by engaging students in thinking outside their ''mental boxes'' (Fleming and Banerjee 2016); that they are vigilant in safeguarding an open, experimental and productive learning atmosphere against closed and defensive ideological reasoning from both the right and the left (Magala 2006); that they do not tacitly accept existing management hierarchies as given (Cabantous et al 2016;Klikauer 2015), but actively explore alternative forms of organization, for example in cooperatives (Leca et al 2014;Paranque and Willmott 2014), communities (Adler 2001) or anarchical forms (Wigger 2016).…”

On the Question of Using the Concept ‘Slum Tourism’ for Urban Tourism in Stigmatised Neighbourhoods in Inner City Johannesburg

“…It would thus make no big difference, I posit, to rename the field of research I describe as slum tourism as 'areas of urban poverty tourism'. Rather, I try to do what political economists have described as 'critical performativity' (Leca et al 2014;Spicer et al 2009). This aims at changing the way 'slums' and 'tourism' are understood and enacted in the world.…”