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[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/hcoltheses Recommended Citation Christiansen, Anders Asa, "Evaluating Workplace Democracy in Mondragon" (2014). UVM Honors College Senior Theses. Paper 31. This Honors College Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Undergraduate Theses at ScholarWorks @ UVM. It has been accepted for inclusion in UVM Honors College Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ UVM. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Evaluating Workplace Democracy in Mondragon Anders Christiansen Department of Political Science Honor’s Thesis University of Vermont May 2014 Committee Members: Jan Feldman, Ph.D. Cornell University Shirley Gedeon, Ph.D. University of Massachusetts Amherst Peter Von Doepp, Ph.D. University of Florida Abstract Following the global financial crisis in 2008, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation was used as an example of an alternative to capitalist development. At the same time, much of the recent literature on Mondragon has questioned whether Mondragon’s democracy has degenerated, without drawing definitive conclusions. I review how democracy has been defined in the past and conclude that while Mondragon’s conception of democracy is applicable in small homogenous cooperatives, it needs to be reformulated in order to apply to large, diverse groups. In its current state, Mondragon cannot be considered a democracy.