Les coopératives, un lien idéal pour développer sa spiritualité au travail ? Les leçons à tirer de la philosophie du travail de Simone Weil

This article questions the existing links between working conditions within cooperatives and the possibility to achieve a real spiritual experience within such organizations. Cooperatives, and generally speaking firms from the social business, are, thus, often perceived as to be a protected world, in which workers can express and develop themselves free. By this way, they could realize themselves through work. Such an attempt is not original per se and is aligned with the definition of social business, whose raison d'être relies in giving the core place to individuals within working organizations. In the social business field, cooperatives propose an interesting twist to existing governance structures of working organizations and start to interest many scholars. On a purely theoretical level, cooperatives should combine traditional economic imperatives and human based management. By securing jobs thanks to the control of the strategy of the organization by workers themselves, and not by any other stakeholder such as pensions funds, cooperatives are perceived as to be the alternative, avoiding delocations and factory closings due to a too low profitability. Far beyond these motivations for more secure jobs, recent research sheds last on the motivation for a better well being at work. However, it is really true? Here the article questions the concept of spirituality at work in cooperatives through the philosophy of Simone Weil, who precisely worked on such a topic during the 30ies.