Edited by Katherine K. Chen and Victor Tan Chen

Update: Organizational Imaginaries received the 2022 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize. You can watch the video below or via this link.

For details about Victor’s other books, go to the Books page.

Our everyday lives are structured by the rhythms, values, and practices of various organizations, including schools, workplaces, and government agencies. These experiences shape common-sense understandings of how “best” to organize and connect with others. Today, for-profit managerial firms dominate society, even though their practices often curtail information-sharing and experimentation, engender exploitation, and exclude the interests of stakeholders, particularly workers and the general public.

This Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or conceptions of organizational possibilities, with a focus on collectivist-democratic organizations that operate in capitalist markets but place more authority and ownership in the hands of stakeholders other than shareholders. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees:

• Emphasize social values over profit
• Are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders
• Employ democratic forms of managing their operations
• Have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments

Organizational Imaginaries explores how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. By ensuring that organizations ultimately support and serve broader communities, collectivist-democratic organizing can move societies closer to hopeful “what if” and “if only” futures.

This volume is essential for researchers and students seeking innovative and egalitarian approaches to business and management.

Buy the Book

Bookshop.org | IndieBound | Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Emerald Publishing (Publisher)

Book flyer (use the discount code RSO72 for 30% off)

Articles about the Book

VCU News (“Sociologist’s book earns award for contributions to advancing economic democracy“), July 11, 2022

Business Wire (“Rutgers Awards New Prizes for Economic Democracy“), June 27, 2022

Op-ed: Fortune magazine (“Cooperatives can make economies more resilient to crises like COVID-19“), May 19, 2021

In The Fray magazine, May 7, 2021

Markets, Power, and Culture blog, April 6, 2021

Table of Contents

Introduction

• “What If” and “If Only” Futures beyond Conventional Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Imagining Collectivist and Democratic Possibilities for Organizing
  Katherine K. Chen and Victor Tan Chen

Part I: Working: Enacting Collectivist-Democratic Practices Through Everyday Interactions

• The Emotional Dynamics of Workplace Democracy: Emotional Labor, Collective Effervescence, and Commitment at Work
  Katherine Sobering
  
• Resisting Work Degeneration in Collectivist-Democratic Organizations: Craft Ethics in a French Cooperative Sheet-Metal Factory
  Stéphane Jaumier and Thibault Daudigeos

Part II: Networking: Connecting Communities through Collectivist-Democratic Practices

• Moral Community as a Yardstick for Alternative Organizations: Evaluating Employee Ownership and Its Place within the Socioeconomic Order
  Jonathan Preminger
  
• The Iron Cage Has a Mezzanine: Collectivist-Democratic Organizations and the Selection of Isomorphic Pressures via Meta-Organization
  Carla Young
  
• A Matrix Form of Multi-Organizational Hybridity in a Cooperative-Union Venture
  James M. Mandiberg and Seon Mi Kim
  
• Economic Democracy, Embodied: A Union Co-op Strategy for the Long-Term Care Sector
  Sanjay Pinto

Part III: Reworking: Challenging and Transforming Capitalist Economies through Collectivist-Democratic Practices

• Organizational Infrastructures for Economic Resilience: Alternatives to Shareholder Value-Oriented Corporations and Unemployment Trajectories in the U.S. during the Great Recession
  Marc Schneiberg
  
• It Takes More Than a Village: The Creation and Expansion of Alternative Organizational Forms in Brazil
  M. Paola Ometto, Asma Zafar, and Leanne Hedberg
  
• Ownership and Mission Drift in Alternative Enterprises: The Case of a Social Banking Network
  Jason Spicer and Christa R. Lee-Chuvala

Epilogue

• Participatory Democratic Organizations Everywhere: A Harbinger of Social Change?
  A conversation with Joyce Rothschild