(Photo by iStock/PeopleImages)
People who have activist inclinations and think the world should be organized in a more just way sometimes help arrange their workplaces in a way that seems more fair.
A new paper uses a survey of workers in cooperatives to formulate a theory that the authors call “civic work,” which helps explain how workers’ volunteerism and activism in the real world can influence the structure of workplace organization.
“Civic work describes how people opt into or create workplaces that embody ideals of the good society and/or serve the common good,” write authors Laura Hanson Schlachter, a research analyst at AmeriCorps, and Kristinn Már Ársælsson, an assistant professor of behavioral science at Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou, China.
The idea of civic work expands upon the concept of “civic spillover,” which theorizes that people’s experiences at work have an effect on what they do in the community on their off hours. “Whereas civic spillover assumes workplace experiences beget civic impacts only outside of work, civic work proposes that civic experiences can have civic impacts at work because people opt into or create workplaces that more closely embody their civic and political ideals,” the authors write.
To examine this idea, the study looks at worker cooperatives, where staffers share in ownership and governance. These workplaces try to operate democratically, with workers either deciding together on business strategy and execution or electing representatives to make decisions.
The study analyzed data from a 2017 survey of 82 worker cooperatives in the United States, including 1,147 of their workers. In addition, the authors interviewed 15 of the workers who participated in the survey. The authors created an index to gauge governance participation by incorporating how often each worker voted for the cooperative board and attended management meetings over five years.
The study compared this data with information from AmeriCorps’ Current Population Survey (CPS), a US Census program for which Schlachter is the technical lead. The CPS data revealed how workers in traditional, noncooperative firms think about volunteering and civic engagement.
The data showed that people who work in cooperatives are more involved in activism, volunteerism, and other avenues of helping their communities than their demographic counterparts who work for more traditionally organized businesses. For workers who get involved in governance within a cooperative—being elected to a management committee, for instance—the authors also found a positive association with civic engagement.
“We find it works both ways,” Schlachter said. “People with civic experience will opt into a co-op,” while co-op employees will volunteer, vote, and be civically active outside the workplace.
A new finding from the study is that people who choose to work at a co-op because of its collective governance structure are more civically engaged both at work and in the broader community than their coworkers who chose to work there for the employment opportunity alone. The longer that co-op enthusiasts work for a co-op, the less they tend to volunteer or engage in activism outside of work, while those who work for a co-op for employment alone show somewhat higher levels of civic engagement the longer they remain at the co-op.
Furthermore, co-op workers often consider their workplace activity and their activism to be one and the same, the interviews suggested, whether at work or in the wider sphere of home and community. Because they work in a democratic workplace, some feel they are contributing to a more just society simply by doing their jobs, while others feel their work product is helping the world in some way.
It’s a boon to the field that “there’s someone who’s systematically studying this important question,” said Nina Eliasoph, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, who called the research “terrific.” While writing her book, The Politics of Volunteering, she found that only political scientists Carole Pateman and Edward Greenberg “had really bothered to ask the initial, definitional question, about whether working in collectives/co-ops can ever be, itself, ‘political activism.’”
A further question researchers might ask, Eliasoph suggested, is whether “the feeling that working in the co-op/collective is a form of activism might possibly wear off over time.”
Find the full study: “Civic Work: Making a Difference On and Off the Clock” by Laura Hanson Schlachter and Kristinn Már Ársælsson, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 130, no. 1, 2024.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.