A Paradox Perspective on the Life Cycle of Worker Cooperatives

Over the past decades, scholars have advocated paradox perspective as a provocative and insightful lens for understanding various types of organizations, including worker cooperatives. However, we noticed that this lens has rarely been used to analyze the various challenges facing worker cooperatives at different phases of their life cycle. Worker cooperatives are unique organizations and social experiments because they are worker- owned and democratically-controlled and they define themselves at least somewhat in opposition to “mainstream capitalism.” In this paper, we argue that due to their very nature worker cooperatives are entangled in a knot of paradoxes, i.e., dynamic interplay between interdependent, pervasive and persistent oppositional forces. Indeed, we show that paradoxes of belonging, organizing and learning are at the core of worker cooperatives and that the coping strategies they adopt to deal with these paradoxes influence how they unfold and perform over time. Our objective is to shed li...