ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to a socioanalytic understanding of capitalist imperatives by exploring the interface of market pressures and the democratic participatory environment of the world's largest worker cooperative: the Mondragon Corporation of Spain. In recent decades, Mondragon's expanding growth and market interactions have challenged its important organizational balance between achieving competitiveness in the global market and maintaining the centrality of workplace democracy. The dynamics of this contentious balance are explored through application of a framework called the ‘democratic capacities' constraint’ to several examples of how formal policies developed to support the democratic environment have shifted to allow the organization to become increasingly supportive of market competitiveness. As a means to look deeper into how and why market imperatives propel these shifts at Mondragon, a socio-analytic perspective is utilized to shed a new light on the effects of market pressures on the organization. In particular, a focus on how the anxiety caused by this organizational tension may be a force at play in perpetuating these shifts highlights both the difficulty of, and potential strategies for, maintaining the integrity of the democratic workplace at Mondragon and beyond.
