Alternative Economic Arrangements

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/003/NR92771.pdf

"Since the years spanning the collapse of Argentina’s neoliberal model, almost 9,400 workers have occupied and now self-manage over 200 once-investor-owned or otherwise proprietary firms that were either failing or bankrupt, converting them into worker cooperatives against great odds. As a result, Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERTs) can now be found throughout its urban economy. While small in numbers, ERTs have inspired the imaginaries of workers throughout Argentina and beyond. In reappropriating the firms that once employed them by taking on projects of autogestión (self-management), ERT workers fundamentally transform them into directly democratic, horizontalized, and socially focused productive entities. In the process, they directly address Argentina’s chronic underemployment and unemployment, save jobs, and, most promisingly for those seeking less exploitative and more humane workplaces, bring control back to workers. More broadly, ERTs have stimulated new expectations for socioeconomic change in Argentina. Reorganizing once private workplaces and reconceptualizing work along cooperative lines, Argentina’s ERTs are both part of a long history of workers’ struggles to self-control and self-determine their own lives and a new type of worker organization that contests the perpetual crisis of the neboliberal order, overwhelmingly prefiguring an alternative social and economic reality.

Grounded in critical theoretical approaches, this dissertation explores ERTs’ “prefigurative” possibilities for alternative economic arrangements, as well as the tensions interlacing them from having to exist within competitive markets. To better understand this “dual reality” which ERTs are embedded in, it deploys an interdisciplinary and two-pronged grid of inquiry—a macro-level “political economy of the working class” axis of research, and micro-level key informant interviews with extended ethnographic case studies of three exemplar ERTs. This approach allows the study to delve into ERTs’ historical conjunctures, workers’ self-activity within the labour process under capitalism, and the transformations of its protagonists from managed employees to self-managed workers.

Ultimately, the dissertation arrives at three major findings. Most broadly, it shows how ERT workers’ projects of autogestión and cooperation are consolidated and strengthened through the collective overcoming of crises within a “moral economy of work.” Second, it lays out ERTs’ “social innovations,” which include the democratic values and horizontalized production processes that re-contour their organizational structures, and the bonds of solidarity created between workers, ERTs, and surrounding communities. And third, it unravels six “recuperative moments” interweaving ERTs’ social innovations: the recuperation of workers’ labour-power, surpluses, capacities to associate and cooperate, the social production of social wealth, the labour process, and the division of labour. Practically, these findings point to viable paths beyond socioeconomic crises, exploitation, and alienation for and by workers. Theoretically, they contribute to advancing sociologies of work and labour; theories of alternative economics; and to our understanding of the formation and dynamics of worker cooperatives and labour-managed firms."

"The paper begins:

Everyone goes through some form of schooling, not just in their youth but, in its widest definition, all their working lives. Schooling, in the sense it is being employed here is intimately connected with organisational power and the politics of social and economic order. Some of the pressures and demands made by such forms of schooling at every stage of life may often be experienced as problematic at psychological, personal, and social levels that hinder development and cause health problems that in the extreme may involve medical, child psychiatric or psychological interventions. There have been many approaches to analysis. From a moralising point of view the child may be seen as lazy, undisciplined, naughty, even wicked. Medical and psychological perspectives may focus on learning difficulties, dyslexia, hyperactivity and so on. From an organisational and system point of view blame may be placed with a lack of resources, the quality of the teaching staff, the structuring of the school day, the teaching methods, the pressures and forms of assessment. What is not in question is the 'good' that schooling represents.

In this paper we question this 'good'."

In the last decade many Argentine enterprises became bankrupt, inspiring thousands of workers to take them over and resume production by forming cooperatives. In 2004, the Programme for Self-Managed Work became the instrument by which the government ‘institutionalised’ the takeovers, depoliticising
the radical aspects of workers’ actions in exchange for financial and
technical assistance in pursuit of workers’ objectives of job preservation and
self-managed work. The paper presents (i) preliminary findings from ongoing ESRC research project on ‘The Movement of the Unemployed in Argentina’ (RES-155 -25-0007) NGPA,
LSE and (ii) findings from a previous research on social mobilisation and policy change in Argentina (2002-03).

There exist interconnected and relational linkages between the increasing in informal occupations and employment, the expansion in state social grants, and the transformation of work and economic restructuring. This essay will attempt to identify these linkages through critical analysis and evaluation of the three themes just mentioned. This evaluation will be structured in the following manner: Firstly, it will define, describe and explain each of the themes, the changes in work, the informal economy, and state social grants; Secondly, this analysis will describe the linkages between these themes a few examples of which are the increase in informal workers due to the shrinking of formal employed staff and the social grant as a means of addressing the injustices caused by the changes in work. Lastly, this essay will provide a brief discussion on the critical points covered in this paper and finally conclude with an overview reflection on this essay.

Most studies of paid informal exchange evaluate its varying magnitude across space and
social groups. Little attention, however, has been paid to the variable nature of paid informal
exchange. Instead, the unchallenged assumption is that such exchanges are universally conducted
under work relations akin to formal employment for profit-motivated purposes. To evaluate critically
this dominant conceptualisation of the character of paid informal exchange, empirical research is here
reported from lower-income and higher-income neighbourhoods of two English cities. This identifies
that although most paid informal exchange in affluent suburbs is conducted under market-like
relations for economic gain, this is not the case in lower-income neighbourhoods. Here, such
exchange is more undertaken for and by friends, neighbours, and relatives for an array of reasons
associated with developing social capital and/or redistribution.We conclude by suggesting that a more
socially, culturally, and geographically embedded appreciation of the nature of paid informal exchange
is now required alongside a fuller exploration of its implications for policy.

Developing community involvement: contrasting local and regional participatory cultures in Britain
and their implications for policy, Reg. Studies 37, 531–541. This paper evaluates critically the implications and legitimacy of the
current UK government policy towards nurturing community involvement that seeks to encourage participation in communitybased
groups (formal community involvement) and neglects the cultivation of one-to-one acts of good neighbourliness (informal
community involvement). Analysing data from the 2000 General Household Survey (GHS), this policy approach is shown to
not only privilege the cultures of community participation of regions such as London and the South East as well as affluent
wards but also to seek to impose it on northern regions and deprived wards that possess different cultures of community
engagement.

This article reports the first cross-national evaluation of the prevalence of a little discussed wage arrangement where formal employers pay their formal employees two wages, one declared and the other an undeclared 'envelope wage'. Analysing the results of a 2007 survey conducted in the 27 European Union member states, the finding is that some 5% of employees in formal employment receive an additional undeclared wage from their formal employer which amounts on average to some two-fifths of their wage packet.

Recently, it has become increasingly recognised that self-servicing is a growing rather than declining phenomenon. To explain this, a range of competing theories have emerged which variously portray those engaged in self-servicing either as rational economic actors, dupes, seekers of self-identity, or simply doing so out of necessity or choice. This paper evaluates critically the validity of these rival explanations. To do this, the extent of, and reasons for, self-servicing in the domestic realm is empirically evaluated through an ...

Abstract.  This article evaluates critically the meta-narrative that capitalism is becoming totalizing and hegemonic. Recently, an emerging corpus of postdevelopment thought has begun to deconstruct this discourse, but only in relation to Western economies and the majority (third) world. To further contribute to this emerging critique, the aim is to analyze the degree to which capitalist economic practices have permeated postsocialist societies through a case study of Moscow. Based on face-to-face interviews with 313 households during 2005/06 concerning their work practices, a relatively shallow penetration of capitalism in this city is identified, with only a minority of households relying on the capitalist economy in particular, and the formal economy more generally, to secure their livelihood. The vast majority of the population is found to depend heavily on an array of noncapitalist economic practices; and capitalist and noncapitalist practices are identified as operating in tandem with, rather than in opposition to, each other. The outcome is a call to refute the universality of capitalist hegemony and to rethink the nature of economic development from a perspective that recognizes the persistence of economic pluralism.

A qualitative study of an APIL of artisans  was carried out to implement the methodology of study of the APIL in Cuban conditions. The footwear industry in Camajuaní, mostly belongs to the private sector, formed by groups of artisans and vendors. Its products have recognized quality and great national and international demand. The economic figures footwear factory, producers sellers and artisan groups present ruptures in their productive chains that negatively influence the gradual increase of their productions, highlighting the lack of raw materials and the use of obsolete technologies. It responds to an ancient tradition and is inspired by the skills of its artisans, shared and improved in a continuous exchange of experiences and constant competition for markets and new profit options. The changes that have taken place in the Cuban economy have conditioned the development of an APIL where the updating of knowledge, innovation and the constant improvement of artisans have guaranteed the competitiveness of their businesses.