English | 1992 | ISBN: 9023227468 | 204 pages | PDF | 3.8 MB

The book you are about to read is unique in many ways.

The product of a

protracted process of participatory action research (hereafter PAR), it is coauthored

by a professional social researcher and six members of the organization

it analyzes. The book deals with the world famous industrial cooperatives

of Mondragon, currently the most successful model of industrial democracy

anywhere. It chronicles and analyzes the organizational cultures and conflicts

in the cooperatives and makes a demonstration of their ongoing capacity

to transform themselves. Given these many threads, readers inevitably will

approach the text with differing interests and from diverse vantage points. We

have done our best to the meet the needs of all, but not every reader will be

interested in all parts of the study.

Trying to achive a balance has been quite difficult. Some readers will be

most interested in a full rendering of the internal dynamics of such an extended

PAR process. Others will only want to know what this study tells them about

the cooperatives that has not been said before. Still others will be interested in

the dynamics of organizational culture portrayed here as another example of the

complexity of this currently fashionable subject.

The authors also have an agenda. We want to tell the readers what we learned

together as a PAR team and this is a complex, multi-faceted matter. We learned

the processes and values of PAR. We learned how dynamism, values, cooperation,

and conflict all interact to make the cooperatives what they are. We

learned what kinds of preconceptions many students of the cooperatives bring

with them to this subject. We learned that a great many issues affecting standard

frrms -hierarchy, alienation, change, etc. -also affect the cooperatives

and, by implication, that successful democracy is not about the eradication of

difference and conflict.

Our own agenda, from the outset, centered on applied research on organizational

culture from an anthropological perspective. This is what the cooperative

members of the research team invited Greenwood in to work on with

them. This also matches Greenwood's disciplinary background as a cultural

anthropologist. Other perspectives would have been possible. Ours is the joint

product of who the PAR team was and what each member had to contribute and

wanted to achieve in the process.



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