Counter-Hegemony at Work: Resistance, Contradiction and Emergent Culture Inside a Worker-Occupied Hotel

This paper is an ethnographic account of the everyday practices and contradictions that characterize workers ’ efforts to build an egalitarian and participatory-democratic workplace in one of Argentina’s recovered enterprises, the Bauen Hotel. I argue that despite instances of exclusion and inequality among workers, the everyday experiences of collective resistance and formal equality that permeate daily work-life within the hotel are facilitating the emergence of a workplace culture that is fundamentally distinct from that found inside a traditional capitalist enterprise. I contend that this emergent culture inside the Bauen is characterized by both a latent assumption of equality among workers as well as a shared oppositional identity between them vis-à-vis hostile external actors. My analysis joins insights from the study of workplace democracy with those from the study of social movements and culture to show how establishing egalitarian and democratic social relations in worker cooperatives can be both limited and facilitated through social movement activity. Consistent with the work of other social movement scholars, my research shows that while social structure imposes constraints on how movements construct meaning, the interaction between movement actors and social structural forces can be generative of new, oppositional cultural forms