Self-management and the new social question: rethinking the relation between the individual and society

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the social role played by the cooperative and self-managed production initiatives utilizing a two-pronged approach: 1- analysis of self-managed companies as an alternative socio-political project for generating jobs and income (specifically, in the empirical case analyzed herein, a project spearheaded by a union which constituted a production cooperative after the bankrupticy of a metal company); 2- analysis from the perspective of a sociability model guided by the new social question that leads to another individual-society relation in which collective actions and projects are connected to individual strategies of social insertion. This research investigates the links that maintain the workers in cooperative in a process of both collective and individual nature. Having conducted two previous investigations on the relationship of the workers with their work in typical capitalist private companies, the goal of the present study is to examine both the differences and similarities of the workers’ relationship with their work in private and self-managed companies and the articulation between the individual and society in the realm of the new social question. Keywords: Self-managed production; authentic producer cooperative; individual-society relation