Abstract:
There is a strong case for studying cooperatives as alternative forms of work organisation. In their reach and economic significance cooperatives may offer an alternative organisational form for creating and maintaining employment in the current global economic climate. Yet, their importance is underestimated because the debate between the proponents and sceptics of cooperatives remain at a high level of abstraction and oscillates between two extremes: their alternative potential as an emancipatory organisational form; a context of radical struggles that is difficult to sustain indefinitely; and the degeneration of their principles and values when distorted by the market competition of the capitalist system. This chapter argues that an institutional analysis, in conjunction with the role of collective mobilisation, may yield a more fruitful way forward in the assessment of cooperatives. The analysis undertaken in this chapter restates the tension between the workplace emancipatory potential of cooperatives vis-a-vis the wider competitive environment at an intermediate level of analysis. Conceptualising the cooperatives as settlement of political processes, the chapter aims to show that it is the dialectics of institutional development and class mobilisation that influence and determine the differing nature and trajectory of cooperatives through a comparative analysis of two cooperative in two states in India.
