Opting for cooperative self-management: The ethical and job quality motives of service-sector professionals and technicians in Barcelona

Abstract

Moving beyond the idea of crises as a prime determinant of cooperative participation, this article provides a nuanced account of why and under what circumstances service-sector professionals in Barcelona have opted for cooperative self-management. Taken collectively, their experiences contribute to how job quality and meaningful work, and a receptiveness to cooperativism and solidaristic diverse economies, might be conceptualised and realised in knowledge-based occupations including architects, legal, finance, and organisation professionals, social scientists, economists, and journalists and communications professionals. For these individuals, neoliberal capitalist market logics have been viewed as fostering conditions that compromise ethical integrity and job quality in their respective professions. They have instead opted for jointly-owned and democratically-managed cooperative enterprises and are advancing economic democracy and the solidarity economy as a means to reassert the normative potential of paid work in society such that workers might realise not only their own well-being and flourishing but also the ‘common well-being’ and general interest.