Theorizing Organizational Inequality: Workplace Culture and Intersectionality in Two Worker Cooperatives

Analysis of work establishments has been marked by two important themes in recent years: the recognition that culture plays a central role in the reproduction of inequality, and a growing awareness of the inherently intersectional nature of race, gender, and social class. Yet these themes have often been developed in isolation from one another. In this paper we seek to foster dialogue between two theoretical genres that can be viewed as complementary—Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction and Acker’s theory of inequality regimes—using fieldwork conducted at two worker-owned cooperatives in Northern California.  We find that the structure of power that unfolded at these workplaces set in motion processes that shaped worker identities and dispositions, and that these in turn fostered symbolic boundaries, status distinctions, and forms of knowledge that had material effects on the effort to achieve egalitarian relations at work. Needed, we conclude, are synthetic approaches that can help explore the ways in which fields, habitus, and capital congeal in ways that yield particular types of inequality regimes, whether in traditional or worker-controlled contexts.