Reconstructing Workers' Practical Capabilities during Conversion to Worker Cooperatives

Abstract

Conversion to worker ownership can initiate a consequential change in authority while leaving substantial work to reconstruct the conditions of practical participation. This paper develops a conditional account of that reconstruction in worker cooperatives. It distinguishes ownership, organizational survival, workers' capabilities, operational authority and the distribution of burdens. A revised process profile records preparation, transition, receiving conditions, reconstruction and persistence through paired comparisons and partial orders. Verified capability, freedom and institutional-transition literature supplies philosophical antecedents, while selected studies of worker buyouts provide bounded empirical confrontation. A small formal model derives the reserve needed to sustain a dated reconstruction path and shows how equal final resources can coexist with different transition requirements. A scenario extension separates a plan selected before uncertainty resolves from a choice that presupposes later information. These accounting results concern one enabling condition and leave the normative assessment of authority and affected interests explicit. Constructed comparisons, objections and a prospective research design examine support, learning, membership, backsliding and viable alternatives to firm continuation. The paper proposes a revisable framework for discussing liberatory aspects of organizational change, with wider empirical validity and the adequacy of its normative premises remaining open.