Theorizing Organizational Inequality: Workplace Culture and Intersectionality in Two Worker Cooperatives

• In Event: 413 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Refereed Roundtable Session. Table 01. Culture and Organizations
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Culture and Organizations

Abstract

Analysis of work establishments has been marked by two important themes in recent years: the recognition that culture plays a central role in the reproduction of inequality, and a growing awareness of the inherently intersectional nature of race, gender, and social class. Yet these themes have often been developed in isolation from one another. In this paper we seek to foster dialogue between two theoretical genres that can be viewed as complementary —Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction and Acker’s theory of inequality regimes—doing so on the basis of fieldwork conducted at two worker-owned cooperatives in Northern California. We find that the structure of power that unfolded at these workplaces set in motion processes that shaped worker identities and dispositions, and that these in turn fostered symbolic boundaries, status distinctions, and forms of knowledge that had material effects on the effort to achieve egalitarian relations at work. Needed, we conclude, are synthetic approaches that can help explore the ways in which fields, habitus, and capital congeal in ways that yield particular types of inequality regimes, whether in traditional or worker-controlled contexts.

Authors

• Joan S.M. Meyers, University of the Pacific

• Steven Vallas, Northeastern University