Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragon

Melnyk, George; Cheney, George

doi:10.2307/25149488

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…He claims that this detachment happens when the rhetoric at a macroorganizational level, in the communications of principles, clashes with the every-day accountability activities of the organization. This is particularly relevant because, when the organization drifts from its founding principles, it can potentially lead to disengagement or, even worse, degeneration (Cornforth et al, 1988;Cornforth, 1995Cornforth, , 2014Cheney, 1999;Webb and Cheney, 2014;Jones, 2007;Langmead, 2017). Similarly, Bousalham and Vidaillet (2018) explore how, even in alternative organizational forms, solidarity principles can succumb to competition or, even worse, can be used rhetorically and instrumentally to sell an image, using a weak form of reputational accountability (Grant and Keohane, 2005).…”

Section: Shaping Boundaries At Fc United Of Manchester 1839mentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking boundaries and creating inclusion-based organization through critical performativity and dialogical accountability: the case of FC United Manchester

Torchia

Scagnelli

Corazza

2023

AAAJ

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to extend research on boundary making and breaking through alternative football clubs. These entities have borne out of the disappointment caused by the neoliberal turn of the football industry, which excluded traditional fans from being active actors and therefore call for study and generalization of specific forms of alternative accountability.Design/methodology/approachThe study looks at emerging trends in the accounting and sport literature by drawing on two concepts that emerged in critical scholarship: critical performativity and critical dialogical accountability, with the aim of better understanding how these elements are developed and shaped within an alternative form of football organization. The focus on Football Club United of Manchester drives the ethnographic approach with data collected via participant observation, field-notes, documental analysis and semi-structured interviews.FindingsThe research shows that the pillars of the club's ethos, pushing its critical performative interventions toward setting new boundaries, are democratic governance and accountability, favoring participation and inclusion, and strictly linked to this, a responsibility to local communities. However, the study also highlights the difficulties of maintaining these boundaries when core values are threatened by degeneration.Originality/valueThe study makes a novel contribution to the field of accounting and sport, showing how an alternative football club adopts inclusive accountability systems that go beyond mainstream neoliberal practices. Such an inclusive approach can stimulate critical performativity, moving away from means-end rationality.

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Section: Shaping Boundaries At Fc United Of Manchester 1839mentioning

confidence: 99%

Breaking boundaries and creating inclusion-based organization through critical performativity and dialogical accountability: the case of FC United Manchester

Torchia

Scagnelli

Corazza

2023

AAAJ

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“…34 This concern is echoed in other research on worker cooperatives, particularly on Mondragón, where scholars have documented how concerns about efficiency have threatened key social values. 35 In terms of labor advocacy through unions, in the context of the former Canadian Auto Workers union, their advocacy for the greater production and sale of personal transport vehicles was counter to the interests of other stakeholders, notably environmentalists and supporters of public transport. 36 Thus, we cannot expect that labor investors in a bicameral firm will be a reliable and consistent advocate for other stakeholders' interests.…”

Section: Learning From Multistakeholder Cooperatives: a More Prominen...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning from Cooperatives to Strengthen Economic Bicameralism

Pek

2023

Politics & Society

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Bicameral firms can generate societal benefits both directly, by granting representatives of labor investors voice in shaping firm decision-making, and more indirectly, by serving as a transition phase from capital investor–owned firms to worker cooperatives. However, there is room to augment these benefits by leveraging insights from research on cooperatives. This article draws lessons from three types of cooperatives—traditional worker cooperatives, multistakeholder cooperatives, and union cooperatives—to help refine Ferreras's proposal for bicameral firms. First, bicameral firms should offer labor investors more opportunities to participate in firm governance and hold their representatives to account. Second, they should create robust channels for other stakeholders to influence firm decision-making. Third, they should carefully delineate the role of labor unions vis-à-vis the Chamber of Representatives of the Labour Investors. These refinements will better position bicameral firms to achieve their direct benefits and facilitate subsequent transitions to worker cooperatives.

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“…The neglect of the concept of revisability in organizations scholarship is perhaps attributable to its apparent incompatibility with the organizational form. Where the revisability of coordinating rules is maximized, it might be hard to say that an organization in fact exists at all (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011;Cheney, 1999), for what meaning does a rule have if one can choose to change rather than follow it? At the very least, limiting the dependability of coordinating rules may conflict with the organization's goals where those goals require complex coordination (Adler and Borys, 1996;Habermas, 1996;Reedy et al, 2016).…”

Section: Revisability and Effective Organizing: Necessary Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘No decision is permanent!’: Achieving democratic revisability in alternative organizations through the affordances of new information and communication technologies

Shanahan

2022

Human Relations

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It seems natural to understand organizational democracy as granting members of the organization the right to choose the rules that govern their actions. But what meaning does a rule have if one can choose to change rather than follow it? By investigating the understudied dimension of democracy I call revisability, this paper suggests that an organization’s rules can be meaningful – they can effectively coordinate action – while remaining continually open to democratic modification. To support this claim, I present an activist ethnography of the Open Food Network, an alternative organization that builds open-source software for the decentralized coordination of short food chains, working in a democratic, non-hierarchical manner. Using the communicative constitution of organizations literature to conceptualize the requirements of democratic revisability and coordinating rules, I argue that this case demonstrates the possibility of achieving both ends simultaneously through the affordances of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This paper thus contributes an account of the concept of democratic revisability, and a generalized model of one means by which democratically revisable and effective coordinating rules can be established and maintained with the support of ICT affordances.

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Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragon

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Breaking boundaries and creating inclusion-based organization through critical performativity and dialogical accountability: the case of FC United Manchester

Breaking boundaries and creating inclusion-based organization through critical performativity and dialogical accountability: the case of FC United Manchester

Learning from Cooperatives to Strengthen Economic Bicameralism

‘No decision is permanent!’: Achieving democratic revisability in alternative organizations through the affordances of new information and communication technologies

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