Alternative Work Organisations

ATZENI, M.

Palgrave

Lugar: Basingstoke; Año: 2012 p. 208

9780230241404

Acute and deep economic crisis,  like the one we are currently experiencing, have always had an important role in reshaping people´s lives and societies. By momentarily breaking the flow of production and consumption, destructing wealth and creating unemployment, economic crisis interrupt the regular working of accepted socio-economic systems and open the room to popular protests and searches for alternatives.  No wonder then that in Argentina since the end of 2001, in coincidence with the explosion of a severe financial, economic and political crisis, local newspapers´ headlines were daily reporting about factories occupied and run by their own workers. Without other options in the labour market and facing the real possibility of starvation, workers took control of their factories reverting taken for granted assumptions about property, management, work organisation, wages, and overall contesting, in the daily practice, the almost natural character of capitalist work relations while contemporaneously creating alternative forms of work organisation.   The case of Argentina is just one of the most recent in a series of workers´ historical experiences with alternative forms of work. From Owen and the socialist utopians to the co-operative movement of the late XIX, from the Russian soviet to the revolutionary factories´ occupations in Italy in the 1920, from the promotion of workers´ control in industry in the 1970s to the cases of workers´ run production and democratic decisions´ making at Tower Colliery and Suma in the UK, from the recent experiences of self-management in Argentina born out of an economic crisis to Venezuelan state supported factories´ expropriation and nationalisation under workers´ control, all these geographical and historically diverse contexts nonetheless have represented cases and experiences with alternative forms of work.     What is the theoretical relevance of all these attempts to revert the ´natural´ state of things of capitalist work relations? What would an alternative model look like? Will market competition influence this new model? Which type of values will be supporting? Who is going to take decisions in the new organisations? Will there be any leaders? What role, if any, for managers? How tasks will be distributed among workers? These are just few of the questions that a serious attempt to envisage new, alternative forms of work organisation will be facing.     Considering this background, the proposed book aims to be a reference point for all those scholars, labour activists and open minded students interested in the study of labour relations and willing to think, engage and be challenged by alternative forms of work organisation.    While remaining within the field of the sociology of work and organisation studies, the book´s focus on ´alternatives´, for the importance the productions level has in every existing socio-economic system, is in itself challenging any strict disciplinary boundary, being of interest for academics and students in a number of humanities and social sciences disciplines: from history to social theory, from politics to public policy, from human geography to social anthropology, from industrial to international relations.