William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, 2nd revised edition, Ithaca, New York: ILR Press / Cornell University Press, 1991, 333 pp. ISBN: 0-87546-182-4.
Making Mondragon is one of the classic works in the literature on worker cooperatives and workplace democracy, examining the origins, growth, and organizational development of the Mondragón cooperative complex in Spain’s Basque Country. Drawing on many years of field research, interviews, and organizational documents, Whyte and Whyte do not simply present Mondragón as a successful example of cooperativism. They also investigate how worker-owned enterprises can be established, grow, and withstand economic crises, while asking how democratic worker control can be maintained throughout the process of growth.
The book does not explain Mondragón’s development through the success of individual cooperatives alone. Instead, it examines the cooperative bank Caja Laboral, the social security system, educational institutions, research and technical support organizations, and mechanisms of solidarity among cooperatives as parts of an integrated institutional structure surrounding the production cooperatives. Caja Laboral, in particular, is not merely a bank providing finance, but a central institution that supports the creation of new cooperatives and can provide financial and technical intervention to enterprises facing crisis. This structure demonstrates that, in the Mondragón experience, the sustainability of worker-owned enterprises depends not only on democratic governance within the enterprise but also on the economic and social institutions surrounding them.
One of the important aspects of the study is that it distinguishes worker ownership from workers’ effective control over production and management processes. Although major policy changes at Mondragón are subject to democratic decision-making by the members, Whyte and Whyte show that participation in the overall governance of the enterprise is not the same as participation in the day-to-day organization of work. In processes of technological change and work redesign in particular, the decisive role played by managers and specialists, while workers in some cases intervene only after plans have been prepared, leads the authors to distinguish between “reactive” and “proactive” participation. The book thus presents a more complex picture of Mondragón, demonstrating that cooperative ownership alone does not guarantee complete workers’ self-management.
These tensions become even more visible in the sections dealing with conflicts within Mondragón. The 1974 Ulgor strike, in particular, is examined in detail as a critical example demonstrating that labour-management conflict does not disappear in a cooperative where workers are also members and owners of the enterprise. Following the strike, in which approximately four hundred members participated, seventeen worker-members were expelled and hundreds of members were subjected to sanctions, provoking significant debates within Mondragón and Basque society over the limits of cooperative democracy. The book also examines wage and short-term income sacrifices during the economic crisis of the 1980s, transfers of workers between cooperatives, and shared social security mechanisms, showing how solidarity was transformed into a concrete institutional practice under conditions of economic crisis.
The revised second edition, published in 1991, also captures an important historical threshold preceding the internationalization of Mondragón that would become increasingly pronounced in subsequent years. Faced with intensifying competition in the European market, technological transformation, the growth of enterprises, and increasingly complex organizational structures, the authors identify how cooperative democracy and worker control can be preserved as scale increases and market pressures intensify as a fundamental problem. The book does not yet cover Mondragón’s subsequent globalization or the debates generated by its non-cooperative subsidiaries abroad; it does, however, clearly reveal the pressures of centralization, competition, and restructuring emerging on the eve of this transformation.
Making Mondragon is therefore not simply a history of Mondragón, but a fundamental study of the sustainability of worker ownership, workers’ control, workplace democracy, and self-management in large-scale enterprises operating within the market. By examining the limits of democratic participation, tensions between management and members, and the problems generated by growth alongside Mondragón’s institutional innovations and economic achievements, the book provides an important historical starting point for understanding subsequent debates over internationalization and the “degeneration” of cooperatives.