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Power, Control and Resistance Within Worker Co-Operatives: an Ethnography of a Co-Operative Factory

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Power, Control and Resistance Within Worker Co-Operatives: an Ethnography of a Co-Operative Factory UNIVERSITE PARIS-DAUPHINE Dauphine Recherches en Management, DRM (UMR CNRS 7088) ECOLE DOCTORALE DE DAUPHINE Power, control and resistance within worker co-operatives: An ethnography of a co-operative factory Thèse pour l’obtention du titre de docteur en sciences de gestion Présentée et soutenue publiquement le 24 novembre 2015 par Stéphane Jaumier Jury : Mme Isabelle HUAULT, Professeure à l’Université Paris-Dauphine (Directrice de thèse) Mme Eve CHIAPELLO, Directrice d’études à l’E.H.E.S.S. (Rapporteur) Mr. Pierre-Yves GOMEZ, Professeur à l’EM-Lyon (Rapporteur) Mr. Nicolas BERLAND, Professeur à l’Université Paris-Dauphine (Suffragant) Mme Robyn THOMAS, Professeure à l’Université de Cardiff (Suffragant) Mr. Thibault DAUDIGEOS, Professeur Associé à GEM (Suffragant) 2 L’université n’entend donner aucune approbation ni improbation aux opinions émises dans cette thèse : ces opinions doivent être considérées comme propres à leur auteur. 3 4 ARTICLE 1 5 6 Stéphane Jaumier Grenoble Ecole de Management & Université Paris-Dauphine PSL, France Thibault Daudigeos Grenoble Ecole de Management, France Vassili Joannidès Grenoble Ecole de Management, France & Queensland University of Technology, Australia Co-operatives, compromises and critiques: What do French co-operators tell us about individual responses to pluralism? Abstract: The purpose of our paper is to contribute to the further understanding of how individuals deal with pluralism by studying the various instantiations they construct based on a shared set of diverse principles. Drawing on theoretical insights from the sociology of conventions, we look at the various modes of justification publicly advanced by French co- operators when substantiating their positions towards co-operative principles. Our analysis allows us to identify three main instantiations of co-operation: pragmatic, reformist and political. Our contribution to the understanding of pluralism and its instantiations by organizational members is threefold. First, and in contrast with studies drawing on an institutional logics perspective, our study shows that individual instantiations of pluralism do not rely on positive affirmations of logics only but also rest on critical mobilizations of competing logics. Second, our study shows that pluralism can be understood not only as having multiple logics, but also along different possible instantiations of the same logic, the ambiguity of which allows compromises to be settled with other logics. Third, drawing on the concept of instantiation, we suggest that organizational members’ responses to pluralism often involve more than two logics, which are combined into a complex set of interdependent positions. In addition, in relation to co-operatives studies, our proposed typology provides a mapping that usefully delineates the range of possibilities found in co-operators’ interpretations of co-operative principles, thus furthering our understanding of the diversity of the co-operative movement together with that of the links between co-operative principles. Keywords: Pluralism, sociology of conventions, compromise, critique, worker co-operatives 7 8 ‘What is wealth, what is worth? We speak about added value but without dealing with the question of wealth as such. And what is wealth today? To what do we grant wealth?’ Co-operative bank representative Introduction Pluralism may sound as if it is evidence for organizational members, most organizations being depicted as increasingly exposed to multiple, often conflicting, principles of evaluation (Kraatz and Block, 2008; Stark, 2009). This is true for private corporations, whose primary objective of profit has been challenged by demands for corporate social responsibility, as measured by triple bottom-line approaches (Gray, 2002). This is true as well for public administrations, whose traditionally dominant concern for citizens’ welfare has been challenged by the introduction of New Public Management, together with its concerns for efficiency and methods borrowed from the private sector (Diefenbach, 2009; Sinclair, 1995). However, this observation has only recently permeated new institutionalism (Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache and Santos, 2010). Indeed, although neo-institutionalist scholars have shown a growing interest in the question of pluralism, i.e. the possibility that distinct evaluative principles coexist, limited understanding of the way organizational members respond to such pluralism has actually been gained to date (Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache and Santos, 2010). The main reason for this paradoxical outcome is that, while acknowledging the presence of multiple evaluative principles at the societal level (Cloutier and Langley, 2013; Rojas, 2010), most research stances have tended, for a long time, to consider the field an intermediate level that operates as a filter between society and organizations/individuals, thus leaving the latter quite untouched by the question of pluralism. The institutional logics perspective provides the most salient example of such an approach (Thornton et al., 2012). Indeed, it primarily situates the stakes of pluralism at the interplay between society, which in its Western forms includes a plurality of value spheres or so-called ‘institutional orders’ (Friedland and Alford, 1991), and a given field, in which a single dominant institutional logic is usually said to govern (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999). When two logics concomitantly populate a field, it is then conceived of as a transitory period of conflict, the formerly dominant logic being progressively displaced by a newly dominant one, for 9 instance as reported in the editing industry, with the shift from a professional to a market logic (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999), and in French cuisine, with Nouvelle Cuisine taking over from Cuisine Traditionnelle (Rao et al., 2003). And when, by accident, two logics come to coexist over a long period of time, geographic segregation contributes then to letting organizations and individuals be unaffected by pluralism (Lounsbury, 2007). Within the institutional logics perspective, a growing number of studies, though, have come to progressively challenge this prevalent consensus by showing that: (1) two logics were sometimes able to inhabit a field over long periods of time (Reay and Hinings, 2009), for example the care and scientific logics in medical education (Dunn and Jones, 2010), and the aesthetic and efficiency ones in architecture (Thornton et al., 2005); (2) a field could be populated by more than two logics at the same time (Greenwood et al., 2010), thus prompting the reference to constellations (Goodrick and Reay, 2011) or pools of these – Goodrick and Reay (2011), for instance, notice within the field of pharmacy a concomitant influence of professional, corporate, market and state logics –; and (3) modes of interaction between field logics other than conflict and competition were also possible, featuring complementarity and mutual support as a possible outcome of field pluralism (Greenwood et al., 2010). These findings have had strong implications for organizations and organizational members, which, under these circumstances, no longer appeared shielded from the effects of pluralism, thus paving the way for studying the kinds of responses they articulate when confronting it (Almandoz, 2014; Besharov and Smith, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache and Santos, 2010). The nascent literature on individual instantiations of pluralism that resulted from this move has so far offered contrasted results, endowing organizational members with more or less agency to leverage institutional logics strategically or to actualize logics on the ground (Bullinger et al., 2015; McPherson and Sauder, 2013; Pache and Santos, 2013a; Smets et al., 2015). As a consequence, it is still unclear how individuals practically deal with pluralism. With the aim of further unleashing the avenue opened by these recent contributions, we choose to turn to a different theoretical stance, which, because of its extended conception of pluralism, may bring promising insights in our understanding of this phenomenon. The sociology of conventions has developed a vision of pluralism based on the empirical observation of the argumentative resources that actors mobilize when they engage in public justifications (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999, 2006). In such situations, actors actually rely, when articulating their claims, on a limited number of so-called ‘orders of worth’, each 10 featuring a singular definition of the common good. All orders of worth being simultaneously available to actors, pluralism is no longer conceived of as a transitional issue to be eventually solved but rather as inherent to any social situation (Cloutier and Langley, 2013; Daudigeos and Valiorgue, 2010). It is because actors are equipped with critical capacities that they are able to deal with the social inherence of pluralism and the ever-present ambiguity this entails. They do this by deciding on the order of worth that should prevail in a given situation, articulating critiques and justifications accordingly and, when needed, settling compromises (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999, 2006). We here contend that such premises offer a strong avenue for furthering our understanding of how individuals construct situated instantiations of pluralism. More specifically, drawing on the premises of the sociology of conventions, we will pay attention to the role of critiques and compromises in these instantiations. Although pluralism can in this sense be understood as a
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