Democracy at Work Within the Market: Reconsidering the Potential

Abstract

This essay treats both democracy and the market. The essay assesses the condition of modern workplace democracy and reconsiders the potential for genuine and thoroughgoing democratic practices within corporations that find themselves “globalizing” and responding to market forces. To ground my analysis, I draw upon the case of the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque Country, Spain, a system of worker-owned-and-managed cooperatives that began to engage the European and global markets in the years immediately preceding European Union unification in 1992. I wish to update and widen the scholarly discussions of Mondragón while also using the case to identify some of the most important contours of the intersection of democracy and the market today.

Citation

Cheney, G. (2005), "Democracy at Work Within the Market: Reconsidering the Potential", Smith, V. (Ed.) Worker Participation: Current Research and Future Trends (Research in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 16), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 179-203. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-2833(06)16007-0