Gendered Constraints and Opportunities: An Analysis of Workers' Experience in UK Cooperative and Collective Organizations

This article is based upon empirical research with 45 cooperative and collective workers, 30 women and 15 men, undertaken in the United Kingdom between 1989 and 1993. It addresses both the constraints and the opportunities that workers experience in such organizations, and how both of these are informed by the gender of workers and the gender composition of the organization. Two lines of argument around which to theorize workers' experiences are presented; first, it is suggested that workers in cooperative and collective organizations have failed to overcome some of the material and discursive constraints that locate women and men in different positions in workplace organizations and in the labour market generally. Second, it is argued that gender inequalities are resisted and challenged by workers in cooperative and collective organizations in ways which allow for a different reading of their experiences, albeit one that is still informed by gender. The article argues that these gender inequalities, and the strategies adopted by workers to overcome them, operate at both the material and the discursive level. It concludes that there is support for both of the two apparently contrasting lines of argument, and that rather than viewing sociostructural and agency- orientated approaches to gender and work in opposition, it is possible to elucidate the ways in which they can be seen as elaborations or developments of one another.