Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragón

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