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Rating: 
Summary: Values at Work?
Review: With Values at Work George Cheney has made a timely and significant incursion into a number debates, including the nature of empowerment, the current infatuation with teamwork, and the social and economic effects of globalization. This is no mean feat as the subject matter of the book, ostensibly at least, addresses a limited area of specialized interest: the recent activities of the Spanish Basque region's Mondragón cooperative network. Using Mondragón as his focus, however, Cheney skilfully and persuasively comments on many issues that face us all in the early twenty first century, whether we be students of organizations or employees subject to the effects of "downsizing," teamwork, or corporate mission statements. In doing this he also neatly interweaves other secondary material from the US, New Zealand, and other parts of Europe.Of course, in the past there has been a great deal of interest shown in cooperatives in general and in Mondragón in particular, most famously the pioneering urban ethnographer and sociologist William Foote Whyte's long-term study (Whyte and Whyte 1991). For many the heyday of cooperatives in Western capitalist economies where the 1960s and 1970s when they became identified with radical politics and workers' control movements. As studies of that period have shown (for example, Landry 1985), many of these experiments in workers' control descended into financial unviability and self-exploitation. Cheney shows us that this "degeneration thesis" was recognised by the Fabian Socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb as early as the 1890s but he also notes that degeneration is not the inevitable destiny of all cooperatives. Indeed, the continued viability of Mondragón is testimony to this. In fact, it is Mondragón's very longevity that makes it so interesting because it is a cooperative that has lasted long enough not only to find itself emeshed in an increasingly globalized economy but also to live through the recent explosion of interest in "participation," "commitment," and the creation of corporate "values." This observation actually makes it doubly interesting because participation, commitment and a strong value system are the very features that have always sustained Mondragón's constituent firms. The basic question Cheney wishes to address is: How have these features been transformed in the face of recent social, economic, and managerial developments? Not unexpectedly, the straightforward nature of Cheney's basic question belies a much more complex range of contextual and explanatory issues. In this respect it is much to Cheney's credit that he has done such a good job of organizing his response to the question in a clear and comprehensible manner. As a writer Cheney is an adept stylist who works through what is sometimes difficult and diverse source material in a way that renders it intelligible to the uninitiated without ever selling it (or the reader) short. No doubt, his background in communication studies has been something of an asset here, both practically and conceptually, and he brings to the field of management and organization studies a refreshing breadth of knowledge and experience. The main device that Cheney deploys to make sense of Mondragón's recent experiences is to separate matters into sets of internal and external pressures. Thus, external pressures relate, among other things, to the rise of consumerism and need to compete in globalized markets whilst internal pressures now include the search for greater productive efficiency through contemporary management techniques such as total quality management and teamwork. One of Cheney's key arguments is that internal pressures, formerly characterised by collectivity and democracy, have yielded to external competitive pressures and, in the process, been transformed in some way. This framework is posed against a backdrop where "values at work" (a nice double-message) are taken to have important material and ideational effects. As Cheney succinctly puts it, "When we say that someone practices what he preaches, we don't really mean that the preaching itself isn't a type of practice" (p.25). Cheney's theoretical interests squarely lie within what the sociologist Poitr Sztompka calls the "culturalist turn" of social science where the study of axiological, normative, and cognitive matters is prioritized. In Chapter 1 Cheney provides a useful summary of previous relevant studies of values at work for readers unfamiliar with this approach as it pertains to organizations. The first problem he addresses is how to attribute "values" to an organization without committing an act of anthropomorphization. His response is to argue for (and undertake) an ethnography that examines how values are produced and reproduced, not by faceless and monolithic organizations, but by the very people who make them what they are. Take one of Mondragón's foundational ideals, that of "participation." According to Cheney we can only understand what this means in an organization if we study, "... who's in the 'loop', what people in meetings are saying, how much they're saying, how they're saying it, who's talking and who's not, what's not being said, what options are not being considered, and so on." (p.25). Although Cheney's focus is primarily culturalist in Sztompka's terms, the chapter closes by outlining the ways in which the internal and external pressures facing Mondragón intersect along social and economic dimensions in three main ways: (1) the "rational" market that is frequently used to legitimate value systems is not quite so rational as many suppose; (2) some organizations, especially cooperatives, have internal limits to growth that are not necessarily explicable using economic principles; and, (3) those very economic principles are ultimately mere stories themselves, a socially constructed discourse that is based on nothing more concrete than "values" like trust, obligation, and the sanctity of contracts. Chapter 2 provides the main historical and contextual discussion of the book. Cheney presents the reader with an outline of what is a fascinating and salutary story of an alternative approach to successful business. Perhaps most interesting are the local cultural, social, and political factors operating in the Basque region after World War Two. Unlike many cooperative movements in other countries, Mondragón had no direct link with the organized labor movement. This is because, under General Franco's particular brand of Fascism, free and independent labor unions were effectively banned until his death in 1975 when Spain began to emerge as a modern European democracy. In the case of Mondragón this vacuum was filled by the members of the Catholic Church. Add to this particular context the politics of Basque separatism and what you have, as Cheney points out, is a situation where values at work are closely aligned with a broader system of strong cultural values. Indeed, he attributes the longevity of Mondragón to a sense of solidarity that had dual roots in regional opposition to Franco and the "liberation theology" of certain sections of the Church. The issue that Mondragón now faces, however, is how to sustain a strong value system given that Spain has become a modern secular state operating in an increasingly globalized economy. In Chapter 3 (with assistance from Yudit Buitrago) Cheney takes individual sets of values at Mondragón and looks at how they have been transformed. Thus he examines how internationalization has created pressures for growth and increased competitiveness. He then goes on to look at how Mondragón's sense of solidarity has been affected (especially as it relates to matter of equality and autonomy) before going on explore the impact that management practices like TQM and HRM have had. Finally, he assesses the changing meaning of participation at Mondragón. In the light of these developments, according to Cheney, the important question Mondragón now faces "... is not Can they keep their core social values intact? but Do they want to?" (p.112). I think that this question is worth asking about all organizations that espouse strong value systems. Cheney concludes his book by seeking out the practical lessons of Mondragón's recent experiences. Although he concedes that Mondragón's context is singular he also points to some more general implications for other organizations in other settings. For my money one of the most interesting is the emergence of a dual loyalty system that has accompanied the introduction of team-based working at Mondragón. Here we see a situation where the values developed by teams (cf. Barker 1999) could potentially reinforce or undermine broader value systems of the organization. It is Cheney's ability to draw out these issues and make them relevant to a wider audience that makes his book so valuable. Ultimately, it also a hopeful book: Cheney shows us that things like participation and autonomy are not unquestionably "good" things but, then again, they need not be a Troja
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