Becoming a cooperative, organisational change in a context of asymmetrical pluralism

Through a qualitative empirical study of six firms that became worker cooperatives, we explore organisational change in a context of institutional pluralism. First, we characterise pluralism: we propose the term ‘asymmetrical pluralism’ to account for the presence of one dominant and several dominated logics. In this context, we explore the conditions under which actors are able to implement radical organisational change and create new hybrid organisations in the form of worker cooperatives. We show that resisting the dominant logic is costly and workers tend to euphemise the change and insist on continuity. However, we do observe institutional innovation that relies on agents’ capacity to use mediating logics in order to bend the dominant logic.