Workplace equality in Argentine worker-recuperated businesses

This dissertation examines organizational efforts to broaden access to power, opportunity, and resources in Hotel Bauen, a worker-recuperated business that was converted from a privately-owned company into a worker-run cooperative. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with workers, and historical research in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this dissertation analyzes how workers transformed the hotel into a worker cooperative by democratizing decision-making, facilitating participation, rotating jobs, and equalizing pay. Because work organizations are commonly studied as sites that produce and reproduce inequality, we know very little about attempts to create and sustain more equal organizations. This project shifts the analytic lens to focus on how workers redefine the meanings of power, opportunity, and resources as part of an emergent “equality project.” Rather than romanticizing these efforts, this dissertation examines not only successes and innovations, but also the many challenges and contradictions that arise in order to present a vivid and realistic portrait of efforts to address inequality and reorganize work in a capitalist economy. I conclude by reflecting on the relational production of workplace equality and developing the concept of “equality projects” to complement and extend the near-exclusive focus on inequality and its effects in existing scholarship.Sociolog