Values at Work

By George Cheney

Book Overview

Values at Work is an analysis of organizational dynamics with wide-ranging implications in an age of market globalization. It looks at the challenges businesses face to maintain people-oriented work systems while remaining successful in the larger economy. George Cheney revisits the famous Mondrag n worker-owned-and-governed cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain to examine how that collection of innovative and democratic businesses is responding to the broad trend of "marketization." The Mondrag n cooperatives are changing in important ways as a direct result of both external pressures to be more competitive and the rise of consumerism, as well as through the modification of internal policies toward greater efficiency. One of the most remarkable aspects of the changes is that some of the same business slogans now heard around the globe are being adopted in this set of organizations renowned for its strongly held internal values, such as participatory democracy, solidarity, and equality. Instead of emphasizing the special or unique qualities of the Mondrag n experience, this book demonstrates the case's relevance to trends in all sectors and across the industrialized world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801433258
• ISBN13: 9780801433252
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: ILR Press
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Values at Work?

With Values at Work George Cheney has made a timely and significant incursion into a number debates, including the nature of empowerment, the current infatuation with teamwork, and the social and economic effects of globalization. This is no mean feat as the subject matter of the book, ostensibly at least, addresses a limited area of specialized interest: the recent activities of the Spanish Basque region's Mondragón cooperative network. Using Mondragón as his focus, however, Cheney skilfully and persuasively comments on many issues that face us all in the early twenty first century, whether we be students of organizations or employees subject to the effects of "downsizing," teamwork, or corporate mission statements. In doing this he also neatly interweaves other secondary material from the US, New Zealand, and other parts of Europe.Of course, in the past there has been a great deal of interest shown in cooperatives in general and in Mondragón in particular, most famously the pioneering urban ethnographer and sociologist William Foote Whyte's long-term study (Whyte and Whyte 1991). For many the heyday of cooperatives in Western capitalist economies where the 1960s and 1970s when they became identified with radical politics and workers' control movements. As studies of that period have shown (for example, Landry 1985), many of these experiments in workers' control descended into financial unviability and self-exploitation. Cheney shows us that this "degeneration thesis" was recognised by the Fabian Socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb as early as the 1890s but he also notes that degeneration is not the inevitable destiny of all cooperatives. Indeed, the continued viability of Mondragón is testimony to this. In fact, it is Mondragón's very longevity that makes it so interesting because it is a cooperative that has lasted long enough not only to find itself emeshed in an increasingly globalized economy but also to live through the recent explosion of interest in "participation," "commitment," and the creation of corporate "values." This observation actually makes it doubly interesting because participation, commitment and a strong value system are the very features that have always sustained Mondragón's constituent firms. The basic question Cheney wishes to address is: How have these features been transformed in the face of recent social, economic, and managerial developments?Not unexpectedly, the straightforward nature of Cheney's basic question belies a much more complex range of contextual and explanatory issues. In this respect it is much to Cheney's credit that he has done such a good job of organizing his response to the question in a clear and comprehensible manner. As a writer Cheney is an adept stylist who works through what is sometimes difficult and diverse source material in a way that renders it intelligible to the uninitiated without ever selling it (or the reader) short. No doubt, his background i