Maurizio Atzeni (ed.), Alternative Work Organizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 207 pp. ISBN: 978-0-230-24140-4 (hardback); 978-1-137-02904-1 (eBook).
Edited by Maurizio Atzeni, Alternative Work Organizations is a collection that theoretically and empirically examines workers’ control, self-management, cooperativism, and democratic forms of work organization that emerge as alternatives to the hierarchical and management-centred organization of the capitalist workplace. The book takes as its starting point a critique of the widespread assumption that the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of managers is natural and inevitable. Atzeni emphasizes that the history of the labour movement is filled with experiences that have repeatedly challenged these assumptions concerning ownership, management, wage labour, and the organization of work.
In the book, workers’ control and self-management are treated as key concepts for understanding alternative work organizations. For Atzeni, workers’ control refers to workers’ democratic decision-making power over production and management and, in this respect, opposes the authoritarian and hierarchical structure of the capitalist workplace with the principles of workers’ autonomy, solidarity, equality, and direct democracy. At the same time, the book does not reduce workers’ control to a single model; it shows that historically it has acquired different meanings and forms, ranging from revolutionary workers’ councils and producer cooperatives to trade-union strategies of control and forms of worker participation.
The chapters in the collection comparatively examine different historical and geographical experiences. Factory occupations and alternative production initiatives in Britain in the 1970s, the worker-owned Tower Colliery in South Wales, the Mondragón cooperatives, producer cooperatives in Venezuela, worker-recuperated enterprises in Argentina, cooperatives in India, and self-help groups in Nairobi constitute the book’s main fields of study. Alternative work organizations are thus examined in different political, institutional, and social contexts rather than being confined solely to the cooperative form.
One of the central tensions explored in the book is the relationship between the democratic control established by workers within the workplace and the external pressures of the capitalist market. Although self-managed enterprises may make collective and democratic decisions about production, they still face market conditions over which they have limited control, including customers, prices, credit, raw materials, competition, and delivery deadlines. Atzeni argues that these pressures can, over time, lead to the centralization of decision-making, the delegation of authority, a renewed rigidity in the division of labour, and the erosion of egalitarian practices. The debate over the “degeneration” of cooperatives and self-managed enterprises within capitalism therefore constitutes an important theme of the book.
However, Alternative Work Organizations does not take these limitations as evidence that workers’ control is either impossible or insignificant. In the case of self-managed enterprises in Argentina, for example, the book draws attention to concrete transformations such as the elimination of managerial and supervisory positions, the decentralization of decision-making processes, and the strengthening of cooperation and shared responsibility in place of command-and-control relations. The Tower Colliery case likewise demonstrates that high levels of democratic organization and collective control could be maintained over a prolonged period despite commercial and technical pressures.
In this respect, Alternative Work Organizations is an important source that examines both the transformative possibilities of workers’ control and self-management and the constraints they face from the capitalist market, the state, and the institutional environment. Rather than presenting alternative work organizations as ideal models, the collection is particularly valuable for showing the social struggles through which they emerge, how they are transformed in their everyday operation, and the material and institutional conditions they must confront in order to sustain their democratic practices.