Documents Huybrechts, Benjamin 2 results

"How can new players seeking to serve nonstandard worker categories (such as project-based workers) establish themselves into labour markets that are highly institutionalized? This paper explores the case of SMart, a Belgian community-based labour market intermediary that successfully developed solutions to better represent the interests of project-based workers and secure their discontinuous careers. Using an organizational legitimacy approach, we find that labour market entry and growth involve different types of boundary-crossing when addressing the needs of workers that do not fit into established categories. However, to justify boundary-crossing, the new player must complement its pragmatic work on delivering new services and tools with conceptual (cognitive) and structural (moral) legitimation work."

"This article contributes to understanding the role and position of worker cooperatives in society, providing a socio-political explanation to their existence as well as conceptual tools that can be used to imagine and implement economic democracy practices. It uses and complexifies Habermas's social theory and its separation between system and lifeworld to show that cooperatives may act, intentionally and idealistically, at the interface of these two domains. This positioning enables cooperatives to participate in resisting colonization of the lifeworld by endowing individuals with resources favouring communicative action and by redefining institutional arrangements within the system. This article identifies factors explaining the varying degrees of resistance to colonization by cooperatives. It also contributes to theorizing the potential effects of organizing work in an economically democratic way."