The WE-COOP Research Project
The WE-COOP project undertakes an intersectional analysis of scripts of workplace democracy, focusing on power relations and emancipatory practices within worker co-operatives. Its aim is to contribute more broadly to critical and feminist scholarship on the social question of labor. The project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant (2023-2028).
Crisscrossing sociology, political science and critical theories, WE-COOP shifts our traditional androcentric perspective on workplace democracy by investigating the labour experiences of women in worker cooperatives in France.
Based on the collective ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of profits, worker co-operatives have been studied for their high potential in the democratization of labour relations. However, ever since their development in 19th century western Europe, they have been primarily considered as a site for class struggle, obliterating transversal attempts at rethinking justice and equality at work, especially (but not exclusively) from a gender perspective.
The underlying idea of WE-COOP is that worker cooperatives are a fertile ground for uncovering sedimented power relations in the sphere of work – especially (but not exclusively) those related to gender – because in theory, as pockets of relative autonomy, they provide individuals with greater agency to reshape their work according to their specific needs and problems.
The greater aim of WE-COOP is to reflect on the dialectics of work and democracy, and to explore the possibilities for emancipation both through and from work via voluntary social cooperation.
Methodology
A study of gender relations within the co-operative movement in France & a dialogue with co-operative experiences in the Global South
For feasibility reasons, the project will focus on a case-study of the French
cooperative ecosystem, which offers a high-potential for research. The results generated will act, we hope, as a probing example for the implementation of similar studies in other European countries.
The WE-COOP project also aims to develop collaborations with researchers and activists working on the experiences of women workers in co-operatives in the Global South, whose development is based on different historical, colonial and exploitative capitalist premises.
A Participatory Research
The project combines traditionnal research methods with participatory research techniques. We wish to address two methodological challenges: fulfil our scientific objectives while rethinking how social sciences can produce knowledge that benefits both institutional circles of science and the communities in which the research is conducted. We propose to produce scientific knowledge while weaving meaningful collaborations with women in worker cooperatives who are, as a social group, directly affected by the research and whose specific experience can in return inform our methodological framework. Our approach draws on the growing critics of “extractive”
methods of research by which scientists collect (or “extract”) data for their own professional benefit with no involvement or positive outcome for the community in which the research is led.
WE-COOP also draws on the feminist standpoint theory according to which individual’s perspectives (including those of scientists) are shaped by their social and political experiences. We argue that a better understanding of the social group of women in worker cooperatives necessitates to include them at favourable steps in our research. With our approach, participation becomes a tool to enhance the production of knowledge as well as the appropriation, by the women workers, of their own collective stories and struggles.
