EXPRESS: Fast and spurious: How executives capture governance structures to prevent cooperativization

IF 4.5 2区管理学 Q1 MANAGEMENT

Human Relations Pub Date : 2022-10-26 DOI:10.1177/00187267221137872

Emilie Bourlier-Bargues, Jean‐Pascal Gond, Bertrand Valiorgue

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Although workers’ cooperatives are regarded as credible alternatives to private companies to reform capitalism, scholars have only started to document the struggles inherent to cooperativization – the process by which private companies transition to cooperative forms. This paper analyses how executives prevent actual cooperativization in practice by shaping and capturing governance structures. Relying on 35 interviews, observations, and focus groups of two private firms having adopted cooperative forms, we document a set of governance practices used by executives to prevent cooperativization: general assembly disempowerment, board neutralisation, and executive committee entrenchment. We then explain how these practices interact to form a spiral of democratic governance prevention that generate spurious workers cooperatives. These results contribute to cooperative studies by explaining the role of executives and governance in preventing cooperativization. Our study enlarges the repertoire of worker cooperatives pathologies and offers political and organisational levers to limit the phenomena of cooperativization prevention and executives’ capture of governance structures.

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快速和虚假:执行者如何捕获治理结构以阻止合作

尽管工人合作社被认为是私营公司改革资本主义的可靠替代品，但学者们才开始记录合作化所固有的斗争——私营公司向合作形式过渡的过程。本文分析了高管如何通过塑造和捕获治理结构来阻止实践中的实际合作。根据对两家采用合作形式的私营公司的35次采访、观察和焦点小组，我们记录了高管们用来防止合作的一系列治理实践：大会权力下放、董事会中立化和执行委员会巩固。然后，我们解释了这些做法是如何相互作用，形成民主治理预防的螺旋，从而产生虚假的工人合作社。这些结果通过解释高管和治理在防止合作中的作用，为合作研究做出了贡献。我们的研究扩大了工人合作社病态的范围，并提供了政治和组织杠杆来限制合作化预防和高管对治理结构的控制现象。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Human Relations Multiple-

CiteScore

12.60

自引率

7.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Human Relations is an international peer reviewed journal, which publishes the highest quality original research to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation. Scope Human Relations seeks high quality research papers that extend our knowledge of social relationships at work and organizational forms, practices and processes that affect the nature, structure and conditions of work and work organizations. Human Relations welcomes manuscripts that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to develop new perspectives and insights into social relationships and relationships between people and organizations. Human Relations encourages strong empirical contributions that develop and extend theory as well as more conceptual papers that integrate, critique and expand existing theory. Human Relations welcomes critical reviews and essays: - Critical reviews advance a field through new theory, new methods, a novel synthesis of extant evidence, or a combination of two or three of these elements. Reviews that identify new research questions and that make links between management and organizations and the wider social sciences are particularly welcome. Surveys or overviews of a field are unlikely to meet these criteria. - Critical essays address contemporary scholarly issues and debates within the journal''s scope. They are more controversial than conventional papers or reviews, and can be shorter. They argue a point of view, but must meet standards of academic rigour. Anyone with an idea for a critical essay is particularly encouraged to discuss it at an early stage with the Editor-in-Chief. Human Relations encourages research that relates social theory to social practice and translates knowledge about human relations into prospects for social action and policy-making that aims to improve working lives.