scholarly journals Learning in Struggle: Argentina’s New Worker Cooperatives as Transformative Learning Organizations

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Vieta
Keyword(s):  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Workplace Learning ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Learning Organizations ◽  
Action Learning ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Worker Cooperatives

SummaryThis article considers Argentina’sempresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores(worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERTs) astransformative learning organizations. ERTs are illustrative of how workers’ conversions of capitalist firms into worker cooperatives—especially conversions emerging from troubled firms and in moments of deep socio-economic crises—transform workers (from managed employees to self-managed workers), work organizations (from capitalist businesses to labour-managed firms), and communities (from depleted to revitalized and self-provisioning localities).Theoretically, the study is grounded in class-struggle, workplace learning, and social action learning approaches. These theoretical perspectives help the study work through how workplace conversions by workers, when converting troubled investor-owned or proprietary firms into worker coops, act as catalysts for contesting workplace exploitation and capitalist crises, while also beginning to move beyond them by forging new social relations of production and exchange. In the case of Argentina’s ERTs, crises in the political economy and micro-economic crises at the point of production during the collapse of the neoliberal model at the turn of the millennium heightened workers’ self-awareness of their situations of exploitation and motivated collective action. As a result, new worker cooperatives were created that also stimulated the social, cultural, and economic renewal of surrounding communities.The study’s research method relies on extended case studies of four diverse ERTs, which included ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews. Observations of daily workflows were conducted, as well as interviews and informal conversations with founding and newer ERT workers. In a more structured portion of the interview protocol, key-informants were asked to reflect on how they had personally changed after being involved in the ERT, and how production practices and involvement with the community had transformed in the process of conversion.The article concludes by outlining how worker, organizational, and community transformations emerge from workers’ processes ofinformal learningandlearning in struggleas they collectively strive to overcome macro- and micro-economic crises and learn to become cooperators. This learning, the study shows, occurs in two ways:intra-cooperativelyvia informal workplace learning, andinter-cooperativelybetween workers from different ERTs and with surrounding communities. The self-management forged by ERTs thus embodies new, cooperative, and community-centered values and practices for these workers that, in turn, sketch out different possibilities for economic and productive life in Argentina.

Kronisk sygdom som biografisk hændelse - et studie af bypassopererede kronisk hjertesyge menneskers biografiske arbejde

1970 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Rasmus Antoft
Keyword(s):  
Heart Disease ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Chronically Ill ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Chronic Heart Disease ◽  
Ability To Act

Chronic illness as biographical occurrence – a study on bypass operated individuals and their biographical work. The primary focus of this article is on bypass operated chronically ill peoples attempt to re-establish their biographical work, their everyday life. The everyday life experiences based on routines and obviousness are subjugated by the chronicle illness influence on the life narrative, its future character and the way in which it affects the shaping of identity, the biographical work. Two different themes are central in individual’s narratives about their everyday life with a chronic heart disease. These themes concern their self-presentation in inter-action with others and their anxiety directed at the future life with the illness, with the anxiety of death. This study shows that every bypass operated and chronically ill participant have experienced difficulties in reshaping their normal biographical work. Their ability to regain social action as part of the biographical work and their shaping of self-identity, has been altered significantly. In various situations this leads to potential stigmatisation, but also to a lack of acceptance in the role-playing of a chronic ill, be that in interaction with strangers or intimate social relations. This causes identity dilemmas, paradoxes in self-presentation and, as a consequence, self-deception in everyday life. The existential problem of anxiety and its subjugating character in the lifeplaning and biographical work is to be explained by the risk of reoccurrence of the heart disease, and by the latency of the possible terminal nature of the disease. The nature of the illness ruptures routines and the predictability of everyday life, thus manifesting itself in key situations of everyday life. In addition to this, the anxiety generates a lack of ability to act actively, that is, the individuals ability actively shape its lifeplaning and its biographical work.

The main causes of social anxiety in the context of social action

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.

scholarly journals Social action learning: applicability to comrades in adversity in Nigeria

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-99
Author(s):  
Adrian Ogun ◽  
Reginald Braggs ◽  
Jeff Gold
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Action Learning

Enriching the intersection of service and transformative learning with Freirean ideas: The case of a critical experiential learning programme in Brazil

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 579-597
Author(s):  
Rosane Dal Magro ◽  
Marlei Pozzebon ◽  
Soraia Schutel
Keyword(s):  
Service Learning ◽  
Experiential Learning ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Management Education ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Management Students

In this article, we examine the value of combining transformative and service learning pedagogical practices in management education programmes to encourage management students to be more critical and reflexive regarding serious contemporary issues like social inequality and sustainability. We draw on a long-term management education experience conducted in the northeastern region of Brazil, where international students learn how to develop a real-time community-based project with local inhabitants. We argue that while service learning approaches promote pragmatic action-based principles, transformative learning acts at the epistemic level, contributing to change in values. In addition, Paulo Freire’s ideas are integrated to reinforce critical and reflexive dimensions of the learning experience. Our results offer a process-based model showing how a critical experiential learning pedagogy might lead to the development of community-based competences, which, in turn, might lead to changes in the deeply held values of the participants. Freire’s emancipatory ideas are applied not only regarding the relationship between teachers and students, but also to the distinction between Western and non-Western societies, going beyond questioning of the destructive consequences of financial capitalism to question the hegemony of one worldview over all other possible ones.

DONALD DAVIDSON AND THE ANALYTIC REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, 1940–1970

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 757-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOEL ISAAC
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Early Career ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTHistories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of value and social relations. This article argues that the reception framework encourages us to mistake the real sources of the analytic revolution in post-war philosophy. These are to be found in debates about intentional action and practical reasoning – debates in which ‘normative’ questions of value and social action were in fact central. Discussion of these topics took place within a transatlantic community of Wittgensteinians, ordinary languages philosophers, logical empiricists, and decision theorists. These different strands of ‘analytical’ thinking were bound together into a new philosophical mainstream not by a positivist alliance with logic and physics, but by the rapid development of the mathematical and behavioural sciences during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. An illustrative application of this new framework for interpreting the analytic revolution is found in the early career and writings of Donald Davidson.

Critical Theory of International Relations

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven C. Roach
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Ir Theory

Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research established in 1923, coined the term critical theory in 1937. While the school failed to produce what could be called a systematic theory, it drew on, and interweaved, various philosophical strands and prominent themes of political and social thought, including historical materialism (Marxism/Western Marxism), Freudian analysis, cultural disenchantment, Hegelian dialectics, and totality. Yet by the 1940s, many of the first-generation Frankfurt school thinkers sought to counter the emasculation of critical reason, dialectics, and self-conscious theory with a focus on the negativity of dialectics. Later critics would claim that they had abandoned the progressive platform of the Enlightenment, or the project of emancipation from social and political oppression. In the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory would provide a so-called critical turn in Frankfurt school critical theory by resituating reason and social action in linguistics. It was during this time that international relations (IR) theorists would draw on Habermas’s theory and that of other critical theorists to critique the limits of realism, the dominant structural paradigm of international relations at the time. The first stages of this critical theory intervention in international relations included the seminal works of Robert Cox, Richard Ashley, Mark Hoffman, and Andrew Linklater. Linklater, perhaps more than any other critical IR theorist, was instrumental in repositioning the emancipatory project in IR theory, interweaving various social and normative strands of critical thought. As such, two seemingly divergent critical IR theory approaches emerged: one that would emphasize the role of universal principles, dialogue, and difference; the other focusing predominantly on the revolutionary transformation of social relations and the state in international political economy (historical materialism). Together, these critical interventions reflected an important “third debate” (or “fourth,” if one counts the earlier inter-paradigm debate) in IR concerning the opposition between epistemology (representation and interpretation) and ontology (science and immutable structures). Perhaps more importantly, they stressed the need to take stock of the growing pluralism in the field and what this meant for understanding and interpreting the growing complexity of global politics (i.e., the rising influence of technology, human rights and democracy, and nonstate actors). The increasing emphasis on promoting a “rigorous pluralism,” then, would encompass an array of critical investigations into the transformation of social relations, norms, and identities in international relations. These now include, most notably, critical globalization studies, critical security studies, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document