Resumen de Decades of Radical Self-Management at a Venezuelan Cooperative: Institutional Distinctiveness and Ideology
Aurélie Soetens, Benjamin Huybrechts, Ignacio Bretos Fernández
Cooperatives have always lived on the edge of established categories, disrupting and disorganizing prevailing cultural, political, and institutional arrangements on the basis of alternative practices organized around normative values like democracy, autonomy, participation, equality, and solidarity. This chapter investigates how ideologies help cooperatives resist dominant institutional patterns and preserve their distinctiveness over time. In order to do so, it draws on an in-depth ethnographic study of Cecosesola, a long-lasting Venezuelan second-tier cooperative that has nurtured radical self-management for several decades. The chapter makes a threefold contribution. First, it contributes to a key debate within institutional theory concerning how alternative organizations resist institutional pressures towards conformity, by describing the process through which alternative organizations make a virtue of nurturing their distinctive organizing patterns and deliberately shield them from the influence of dominant institutions. Second, it contributes to the literature on organizational ideology, by unveiling the conditions under which a radically distinctive ideology may be created, sustained, and reproduced over time within the boundaries of a participatory organization. Third, it contributes to the debate on the degeneration of participatory organizations, by unveiling how the development of a strong ideology contributes to protecting workplace democracy against external and internal forces leading to the erosion of participation.
