Teaching about Alternatives to Bureaucracy

New Discussions and Approaches*

Adria Scharf Katherine K. Chen�Rutgers University The City College and Graduate Center, CUNY

Victor Tan Chen Katherine Sobering�Virginia Commonwealth University University of North Texas

Joyce Rothschild�Virginia Tech

American Sociological Association, Los Angeles, August 7, 2022, 8 a.m. PDT

Overview of Session (8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.)

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Background

Teaching Ideas

• Our teaching stories
• Resources for a variety of courses

Discussion

• Tailoring content to your classes
• Crowdsourcing ideas

• Framing “cooperative alternatives to bureaucracy”
• Empirical examples
• Introductory resources

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Bureaucracy: most familiar, legitimate organizational form

Source: Rothschild-Whitt (1979)

Common or related terms: alternative organizations, alternative / social enterprises, collectivist-�democratic organizations, participatory organizations

What are some alternatives to bureaucracies?

Employee-owned businesses

• Broad inclusive ownership
• May govern themselves democratically
• Some use cooperative, nonhierarchical forms of supervision and organization

Variety of types

• Worker cooperatives: owned equally by workers; 1 person, 1 vote
• Platform cooperatives with worker ownership: workers in digital economy own business, may own app or platform

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• Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs): give workers a stake—small or large—in the company through their retirement plans; often replicate traditional organizational structures
• Employee ownership trusts: half of shares owned by workers; dominant in UK

Worker cooperatives and ESOPs in the U.S.

612 worker cooperatives in the U.S. in 2021 (many more outside U.S.)

• Growth during pandemic: up from 465 in 2019
• Employ 6,000 people, $283 million in annual revenue

Much larger footprint for ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans)

• In U.S., 6,257 companies owning a total of $1.6 trillion in assets

Sources: Biannual census by the Democracy at Work Institute and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives; National Center for Employee Ownership

Introductory resources

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• The Case for Employee Ownership (report by Project Equity)
• National survey of cooperatives conducted by the Democracy at Work Institute
• We the Owners documentary film

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Other forms of egalitarian ownership and decision-making

• Consumer cooperatives
• Producer cooperatives
• Communes

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Participatory democratic social movement groups and voluntary associations

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• Feminist groups
• Direct action groups (Occupy, Autonomen in Germany)
• Giving circles
• Mutual aid groups
• Democratic / free schools and learning centers

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Partial ownership and �decision-making by stakeholders

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• Credit unions �and community banks
• Mutual societies �(e.g., insurance mutuals)

Self-management

• Worker self-directed nonprofits

Hybridized organizations

• Nonprofit board and staff, with members having a say in everyday activities and a blurring of distinctions between members and staff

Similarities and differences

across these forms

Can differ in their values, ownership, decision-making, and social relations

But often share a desire not to replicate oppressive hierarchies of bureaucracies

• Workers (including frontline workers), consumers, and other stakeholders: deeply involved in participatory decision-making processes

Another world is possible?

• Solidarity economies in Brazil (and in Jackson, Mississippi, USA)
• Way of “eroding” capitalism by increasing organizational diversity? (Wright 2015)

Outcomes associated with under - / over- organizing with bureaucratic and collectivist practices

Collectivist

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Bureaucratic

Source: Chen (2009:20)

Teaching Resources

Rutgers University Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership (CLEO)

https://cleo.rutgers.edu

Online library of teaching and research materials on employee ownership

• Sample syllabi with employee ownership readings
• Library of reports and case studies of worker-owned companies
• Lists of datasets on employee ownership that are freely available
• Search resources by country/date/subject/format
• CLEO connects professors with guest speakers to speak to your class (without a speaking fee!)

To share your teaching modules, syllabi, and publications with CLEO, contact Adria at adria.scharf@rutgers.edu

Katie’s experience

Undergraduate course on the sociology of work

• Class is set up as interrogation of work under capitalism with examples and proposals to make work more just, equitable, and democratic
• Students learn about bureaucracy and alternatives to bureaucracy simultaneously
• Readings include case studies of different ownership arrangements and managerial models (most recently, Chen’s book on Burning Man, Lee’s work on holacracy, news reporting on Winco, and my work on worker-recuperated businesses)
• Final group project asks students to apply a critical lens to their own work experience and make a collective proposal for the future of work

Victor’s experience

Concluding classes on economic inequality and social stratification; from my slides:

What are the best ways to deal with the challenges presented by economic inequality?

• Changes to the social safety net, the tax system, and other forms of redistribution? (tax-and-transfer policies)
• Government interventions to affect income or consumption—before taxes? (market inequality policies)
• Worker cooperatives and other forms of collectivist-democratic organizations that operate within markets but with different practices and goals than just profit maximization? (alternative ownership / alternative enterprises)
• Moral renewal in regards to work ethic, family responsibilities, sense of community and egalitarianism? (cultural change)
• Grassroots organizing to bring about these various outcomes?

The following are slides you can just throw into your slide deck (won’t go over them):

Worker cooperatives and other collectivist-democratic organizations

Alternative enterprises: based on social values

• Triple bottom line: consider social and environmental impacts in addition to financial impacts (profit)
• Wide range of alternative enterprises: from B-corps to nonprofits, to cooperatives
• Joyce Rothschild: collectivist-democratic organizations

Renewed interest in these more radical approaches

• Democratic forms of governance: companies collectively owned and run by members of the organization

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Source:

https://www.valvesoftware.com/de/publications

(available in multiple languages)

Worker cooperatives and other collectivist-democratic organizations

Worker ownership:

• From employee stock ownership (all workers own stock and thus share in profits) to worker cooperatives (workers run the company by voting on management decisions: one worker, one vote)
• Find a list of worker cooperatives here
• Largest U.S. worker cooperative: Cooperative Home Care Associates (1985)
• Largest worker cooperative in world: Spain’s Mondragon Corporation (1956)
• Varying degrees of worker involvement in management

Cooperatives can be found in a variety of area—even in the banking sector:

• Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements pushed for credit unions
• Not as focused on profit: e.g., offer lower-cost alternatives to for-profit payday loans

Some evidence of larger community benefits of alternative enterprises

• Marc Schneiberg (2021): areas with large numbers of alternative enterprises saw lower surges in unemployment during the Great Recession and faster reductions in unemployment during the subsequent recovery

Worker cooperatives and other collectivist-democratic organizations

Based on values, but also need to survive in a (capitalist) marketplace

• Competing institutional logics of financial tendency toward mission drift (organization moving away from founding principles)
• Iron law of oligarchy (Robert Michels): “Who says organization, says oligarchy”
• Can such organizations sustain democratic values?

Social movements play an important role in “imprinting” (sustaining) these non-financial values of democracy and social responsibility

• Jason Spicer and Christa Lee-Chuvala (2021): In a network of “ethical” banks (focused on triple bottom line), those banks that had ties to social movements were less likely to leave the network

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Katherine’s experience

Learned from Richard Hackman, organizational psychologist and expert on team work, who taught teamwork in undergraduate class by having them practice teamwork

Frustration with how sociology is problem-focused (poverty, inequality, homelessness, etc.) but is limited on how people collectively coordinate and expand toolkits

Researches a liberatory learning center and its larger network:

• Went through multiple trainings at research site
• Has participated in offerings to learn how to facilitate learning experiences
• Also went through emergent strategy facilitation training at Allied Media

Teaches at a minority-majority public university known for launching students into economic mobility

Katherine’s experience with methods and elective courses

Any class can be an opportunity for students to practice aspects of participatory organizations : prefigurative process is just as important as outcomes

Showcase studies of prior and contemporary participatory organizations

Student-led discussion and facilitation with emphasis on inviting participation

Practice incorporating individual and collective needs and interests

Community- and relationship-building as part of group learning:

• Flipped classroom with recorded lectures, classtime spent learning from each other
• Group project with presentation: group together similar sites, what people paid attention to, what they didn’t
• Built-in groupwork time and feedback forms on teamwork experiences

Readings emphasize minoritized perspectives that highlight interdependence: Combahee River Collective Statement, Data Feminism, Data Justice

Adria’s experience and advice

Worker Cooperatives in Health Care in the United States

• Interviews with 10 worker cooperatives ranging in size and complexity
• Variation in worker cooperative practice:
• Representative vs. direct democracy
• Degree of formalization
• Degree of hierarchy
• Conclusion: elements of bureaucracy in democratic organization can function well, offer resilience, enable worker voice (consistent with Chen, Meyers)
• Worker cooperatives vary in how they structure division of labor, supervision and hierarchy

Teaching courses that …

• Help students “see” dominant, taken-for-granted models of organization that shape their lives
• Plant the seed that “other ways are possible”

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Participatory organizations can be taught in a variety of classes

• Methods (including Data and Society)
• Theory
• Sociology of Organizations / conventional business classes
• Nonprofit / Voluntary Associations / Arts Management
• Sociology of Work
• Race and Ethnicity
• Gender
• Immigration
• Education / Learning
• Social Problems / Design Thinking (see Jerry Davis’s syllabus)
• Social Movements

… and many more!

Methods classes

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• CLEO: Lists of datasets on employee ownership that are freely available
• How to study emergent phenomena
• Class research opportunities on alternative organizations: organizational ethnographies, interviews, surveys, etc.
• Platform cooperatives: good topic for Data and Society class

Theory classes

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How to interrogate capitalist assumptions about work, organizations, and the economy

• Counter to Marx’s critique of work under capitalism and exploitation
• Foil for Weber’s “iron cage” argument about bureaucracy
• Possible support for Durkheim’s arguments about integration and anomie

State-of-the-art article by Jason Spicer and Tamara Kay

Sociology of organizations and conventional business classes

How to include discussion of employee ownership?

• Include topic areas: alternative organizations (or alternative enterprises), organizational democracy

Conventional business classes

• CLEO: case studies of employee-owned firms

General background

• CLEO: reports on employee ownership
• CLEO: sample syllabi with employee ownership readings

Articles by Marc Schneiberg (et. al) about role of social movements

Add a description here?

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Work and

Inequality

Crossnational legal/policy contexts: easier to start cooperatives elsewhere?

• In Basque Country, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation

• Even the U.S. has a long history of alternative organizations: Knights of Labor, the Grange (postbellum agricultural movement opposed to corporations; launched cooperatives and mutuals)

Unions and cooperatives

• Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative (now called Co-op Cincy) and 1199SEIU

Socio-Economic Review article by Jason Spicer

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Classes on work and inequality

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• Comparison of how two worker cooperatives that generate eight-figure annual revenues in the U.S. manage diverse memberships (Meyers 2022)
• Worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina that promote organizational equality (Sobering 2022)
• Survival finance

Classes on race and ethnicity and gender

Disadvantaged communities turned to alternative forms of organizing after being excluded or underserved by dominant markets or programs

• Women of color: 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement
• Collectives and self-help / solidarity economies formed by African American communities (Nembhard 2014)

Immigration classes

Immigrant worker-owners are the largest and fastest-growing segment of worker-owners in the United States

Case study: Up & Go, a digital platform cooperative in Brooklyn (short video)

• Allows users to book cleaning services
• Organized and owned by workers, many of whom are undocumented
• Don’t need traditional status to be employable in a cooperative

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Classes on nonprofits and voluntary associations

Classes on social movements and social change

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Examples of decentralized organizing:

• Black Panthers
• Occupy and its precursor Direct Action Network (DAN)
• Billionaires for Bush: progressive activist group that used satire and humor to engage people
• Beautiful Trouble: online and print toolbox for grassroots activism (Creative Commons-licensed)
• Beautiful Solutions: crowdsourced ideas for participatory democracy and alternative economics (Creative Commons-licensed)

Education

classes

Learning communities for researchers

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Next SASE annual meeting (2023) is in Brazil: https://sase.org/event/2023-rio-de-janeiro. CFP will be distributed in November 2022.

(SASE meetings are usually in Europe or U.S.; Network A listserv that you are free to join is at inthefray.org/list.)

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Discussion

The following slides are teaching suggestions and experiences shared during our discussion.

Students have difficulties imagining alternatives

• Many do not yet have firsthand experience with participatory practices
• Classroom would be the first place for this
• Katherine Chen uses example of a group of friends trying to decide where to eat
• Example of the difficulties of collective decision-making
• People often default to the least-satisfying option
• Give the class an assignment to look at the diversity of organizations in their local communities
• Helps students realize the variety of organizational options around them
• Find relevant stories in alternative news sources that cover contemporary organizations (e.g., nacla.org)

Students have difficulties imagining alternatives

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Use video clips and documentaries that immerse students into the challenges of democratic forms

• The Take: documentary about worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina
• Email Katie Sobering for an updated teaching slide deck, “Worker-recuperated businesses since The Take”
• Approaching the Elephant: documentary about a free school in New Jersey
• Lots of videos related to Occupy (such as this classic Colbert Report interview)

Teaching tools from Marc Schneiberg

Marc Schneiberg, Reed College

• In Introduction to Sociology, assigns reading on do-ocracy when discussing symbolic interactionism: e.g., Chen’s (2016) “Plan Your Burn, Burn Your Plan”
• Organizes class projects around three themes: how can people create organizing around (1) predictability, (2) creativity, and (3) democracy?
• Emphasizes importance of cultivating organizational ecosystems that allow alternative organizations to thrive
• Assigns Lipsky’s (1968) “Protest as a Political Resource”
• Also uses America Beyond Capitalism

Teaching tools from Jason Spicer

Jason Spicer, University of Toronto

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• Conducts simulation exercises similar to those used by Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation
• Teaches students how to frame social movements and engage with contentious repertoires
• Uses cases and tools from:
• The Democracy Collaborative’s Community-Wealth.org site
• Grassroots Economic Organizing’s collections
• Beautiful Trouble's toolkit
• Beautiful Solutions
• The Next System Project’s learning resources

Participatory practices in governance

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Volume with papers on participatory organizations by Katherine Chen, Victor Chen, Katie Sobering, Marc Schneiberg, Jason Spicer, and others

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Available via Emerald Publishing’s series Research in the Sociology of Organizations, edited by Michael Lounsbury

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More about the book: victortanchen.com

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Emerald page: bit.ly/EP_RSO72

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Use special conference discount code (RSO72) for 30% off

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TOC

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Keep in touch!

(Email us to get resources after the session)

Adria Scharf

adria.scharf@rutgers.edu

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Katherine K. Chen

kchen@ccny.cuny.edu

@KatherineKChen

Victor Tan Chen

vchen@vcu.edu

@victortanchen

Katherine Sobering

Katherine.Sobering@unt.edu

@ksobering

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Public mailing list for SASE Network A (focused on cooperatives and collectivist democracy): inthefray.org/list