Co-operative Struggles: Work Conflicts in Argentina’s New Worker Co-operatives

Denise Kasparian, Ph.D. in Social Sciences (2017), University of Buenos Aires, is Assistant Professor at that university and Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council. She has published books and articles on conflict and social change in co-operatives.

"Denise Kasparian’s Co-operative Struggles provides an in-depth study of two worker co-operatives in the Buenos Aires area today to reveal how co-operatives emerge, are governed, and disappear. She successfully confronts people’s implicit assumptions about co-operatives with observations from everyday realities of working in Argentinian worker co-operatives in the 2000s and 2010s. Her research thereby puts several dominant myths about the co-operative economy into perspective [...] Sociological research provides a litmus test that checks which myths have become invalid or are not applicable to a particular economic sector. Kasparian has admirably shown how such a test would work in the specific political and economic conjuncture of contemporary Argentina". Tim Christiaens, in Critical Sociology, 8 April 2022. Critical Sociology“El libro amplía los horizontes teóricos sobre el conflict laboral, proponiendo nuevas categorías para visibilizar y conceptualizar las contiendas en el nuevo cooperativismo de trabajo del siglo XXI”. In Centro de Estudios de Sociología del TrabajoUniversidad de Buenos Aires, 21/04/2022."This book, made up of two unlikely types of cooperatives, one formed voluntarily and the other formed through state-sponsorship, contributes to the literature of self-management and co-operatives and provides a deeper understanding that aspects of the democratization of conflict in co-operatives are context-specific. Future research should deepen and expand the study of self-management and conflict in the broader ecosystem ofworker-recuperated, state-sponsored and traditional worker co-operatives, and thus contribute further to generalizable ideas about self-management."Stefan Ivanovski, in ILR Review, ILR Review

• Foreword The Democratisation of ConflictAcknowledgementsList of Figures, Tables and ImagesIntroduction1 The Question of Work Conflicts in New Co-operatives2 Dimensions of New Social Conflicts in Co-operative Socio-productive Contexts3 The Challenge of Comparing Paradigmatic but Non-equivalent Experiences: Studying a Whole That Acts as a Whole4 The Structure of the Book1 Co-operatives ‘Made in Argentina’ The Process of Enterprise Recuperation by Their Workers1 The Socio-genesis of the Processes of Enterprise Recuperation1.1 When Worker Resistance Becomes an Offensive Movement1.2 The Widespread Crisis of 2001–2002, or Adding Fuel to the Fire1.3 The Movement of the Flames2 The Evolution of Enterprise Recuperation Processes2.1 The Fuel of the Growing Economy Keeps the Flames of Production Moving2.2 The Moral Economy of Work in the Continued Presence of Enterprise Recuperations2.3 “Argentina Is One Big, Recuperated Factory”: Public Policies for Recuperated Enterprises2.4 The Movement’s Fragmentation, Co-operative Convergence and Union Rapprochement2 Incubated Co-operatives Co-operative Formation under the Argentina Works Programme1 Social Schemes with Work Requirement: From Workfare to the Argentina Works Programme2 The Mediation of Unemployed Workers’ Organisations: Civil Associations, Productive Units and Co-operatives3 The Dual Logic of the Argentina Works Programme’s Socio-genesis: Creating Jobs and Co-ordinating Local Politics4 Induced Co-operatives? The Struggle of Unemployed Workers’ Organisations4.1 The Evolution of the Argentina Works Programme4.2 The Intensity and Dynamics of Contentious Action4.3 The Demands and Forms of Contentious Action3 Keeping and Having a Job A Milestone in Constitutive Conflicts1 ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’ … and Have!2 From ‘Induction’ to the ‘Co-operative without Brokers’3 A Comparative Lens on Constitutive Conflicts4 The Recuperated Enterprise and Social Power in Production1 Recuperators, Activists and the ‘Born and Bred’2 Property Relations: Social Possession and Differential Appropriation of the Fruits of Labour3 The Logic of Production and the Issue of Sustainability in Recuperated Enterprises4 The Political Dimension: Between Self-management and Delegation5 Social Groupings and Potential Antagonisms: Opportunity Hoarding, Enterprise Projects and Work Generations5 The Argentina Works Co-operative and State Power in Production1 The Labour and Socio-spatial Precarity of Argentina Works Programme Workers2 Property Relations: Social Possession and Autonomy3 The Logic of Production: Between Subsistence and Political Accumulation4 The Political Dimension: State Power and Co-management5 Social Groupings and Potential Antagonisms: State Officials, Co-operative Members and Activists6 The Production of Co-operative Conflict1 Board Removals: Conflicts over the Running and Expansion of the Productive Process2 Regulations, Sanctions and Exclusions: From ‘Founder Members’ to ‘Founderer Members’3 “We Fought over the River Module”: The Conflict over Autonomous Work4 Between Subsistence Consumption and Political Accumulation in the Social Organisation5 A Comparative Lens7 Conclusions1 The New Twenty-First-Century Co-Operativism and Its Struggles Around Work2 What Patterns of Conflicts are There without Bosses? Towards a Theory of Unrest in Worker Co-operatives3 From Prelude to Present: A Toolbox for New Research QuestionsBibliographyIndex