The meeting of politics and work: a psychosocial study on the self-management experience at the Univens cooperative

Abstract

This article is the result of a research project in Social Psychology (IP-USP). Its goal was to identify the main sociopsychological repercussions of the self-management experience in a sewing cooperative in Porto Alegre (RS) called Univens. It tried to understand how the experience of selfmanaged work relations aff ects the social lives of its subjects in the work environment as well as in the family, the neighborhood, and even the city. The investigation is a case-study in which the researcher chose a methodology based on ethnographic observation and the realization of partially structured long interviews and used the works of Simone Weil
and Hannah Arendt as theoretical references. The political experience which some of the members of the cooperative made in the local Participatory Budget was the main symbolic wellspring of the cooperative, as it inspired some of its principles, such as its equalitarian work relations and its democratic and participatory management practices. The study came to the conclusion that it was the political experience that led to the economic experience. The right to work, the fact of belonging to the group of the cooperative, and the rootedness as subjects in the spaces of the neighborhood and work represent the main repercussions of these experiences. They are referred to here as permanencies since they made up a stable field of references for these workers capable of safeguarding the maintenance of their family life and the power of intervention of their daily political actions. Finally, the article discusses the possibility of projecting and realizing political actions with a wider horizon as a secondary repercussion of those permanencies and, therefore, of the self-management experience itself for its participants.

Keywords: social psychology, work, politics, selfmanagement, solidarity economy.