Worker Identities

Abstract

This chapter returns to the question of how such similar groups came to create such different organizational structures and different inequality regimes. It explores how distinct worker identities were constructed between individuals and through organizational practices at each cooperative. It also shows how those identities became something workers (and managers) could use to expand or limit workers' power. Worker identities became part of the organizations' “diversity regimes,” or the formal mechanisms used by the cooperatives to address social differences among their workers. These diversity regimes further expanded or limited worker access to organizational resources, including wealth and power; they also legitimated each cooperative's organizational structure in important (but not inevitable) ways that seemed to render them “natural” at each site.