Values at Work: Mondragon
Whyte celebrated Mondragon's growth; Cheney asks what happens when democracy meets markets. The cooperatives are evolving—not abandoning values, but treating them as costs.
The same business slogans heard around the globe are being adopted by organizations renowned for participatory democracy, solidarity, and equality—this is the central tension Cheney documents. Where Whyte (1991) celebrated Mondragon's growth, Cheney examines what happens when cooperative values meet market pressure. The cooperatives are changing through both external competitive forces and internal efficiency reforms, adopting language like 'competitiveness' and 'flexibility' that would have seemed foreign a generation earlier. This reveals a fundamental trade-off in cooperation-enforcement systems: the mechanisms that enable internal solidarity can become liabilities when competing against organizations that don't bear those costs. Like colonial organisms that sacrifice individual reproductive fitness for collective success, Mondragon must balance member democracy against market survival. Cheney finds the cooperatives evolving toward efficiency—not abandoning democracy, but increasingly treating it as one consideration among many rather than the foundational value.
Key Findings from Cheney (1999)
- Market globalization pressures are eroding Mondragon's distinctive democratic practices
- Business language ('competitiveness', 'flexibility') is replacing cooperative language
- Efficiency reforms increasingly prioritize market survival over participatory democracy
- Cooperative values become costs when competing against organizations without those constraints
- The cooperatives are evolving—not abandoning democracy, but treating it as one value among many