Doctoral Dissertation Research: Comparative Research on Dispute Resolution and Gender Dynamics in Worker Cooperatives and Matched Hierarchical Businesses

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Prior research in traditional workplaces has demonstrated that men and women manage disputes differently. However, these findings have not been replicated in more egalitarian workplaces. Worker cooperatives, in which all members both own and co-manage the workplace, are ideal sites for examining the generality of the previous findings. Existing theories offer conflicting predictions. Some assert that women will raise grievances as frequently as their male co-workers, being empowered by an egalitarian ideology. Other approaches argue that women will raise fewer grievances, being more affected than men by the cooperative ethos. Still other theories hold that women will raise more grievances, lacking the power to resolve disputes through anything other than formal action. This project will examine these hypotheses by investigating four sets of businesses. Each set consists of one worker cooperative and one traditional business, both in the same industry and with similar employee demographics. These sets range in their gender composition from mostly male to mostly female. Data are provided from interviews with a number of individual members of each organization, and hypotheses will be tested using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition to examining the generality of prior research in more traditional organizations, the results should be vital to an understanding of the issues of gender, grievance resolution, and workplace dynamics in the non-hierarchical workplace.