The possibility of disalienated work: Being at home in alternative organizations

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz,Monika Kostera,Martin Parker

doi:10.1177/0018726720916762

Abstract

Work organizations have long employed various management techniques in order to maximize workers’ engagement, which in itself implies that ‘alienation’ at work is common. One of the central descriptions of alienation in classic writings is the idea of not being ‘at home’ while at work. In this article, however, we explore its obverse, which we term ‘disalienation’ – a relationship to work based on assumptions concerning control and agency, aided by collective participatory mechanisms for identity construction and dialogical building of social relationships. We suggest that the concept and experience can be productively explored in the context of organizations which are owned and controlled by workers. Using ethnographic case studies from two Polish co-operatives, we discuss the potential characteristics of a disalienating relation to a work organization and suggest that co-operatives can provide a way for workers to be ‘at home’ while they are at work.

Highlights

Some sort of distinction between work and other forms of human activity is a fundamental one in the contemporary global North
What working conditions can foster disalienation? If alienated workplaces are the result of capitalist relations of production, are collectively owned and controlled workplaces examples of labour which is not alienated? We explore these propositions by examining two organizations selected from a wider ethnographic research project on co-operatives and, we believe, demonstrate that disalienation can result from a process of providing meaningful agency in the workplace
The question of how disalienation is achieved is an empirical one and so our research examines experiences of work in organizations which we believe seek to disalienate and the most obvious sites for this kind of exploration are alternative organizations, worker owned and controlled ones which explicitly address such issues directly in their practices (Erdal, 2011)

Summary

Introduction

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1844/2007: 72) described such a separation as an inevitable outcome of capitalist labour conditions, asserting that the worker ‘only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. Not feeling at home is a powerful metaphor for the estrangement experienced, Marxists argue, because the capitalist mode of production objectifies labour, turning it into a commodity bought and sold in an exploitative market (Sayers, 2011). It evokes notions of being at ease, security and companionship stemming from an idealized understanding of homeliness which might not necessarily be reflected in one’s living conditions. Marx’s pairing of not feeling at home with feeling outside oneself seems to point to a fracture between working and living arrangements which can generate this sense of unease

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