Building Consciousness: The Organization Workshop Comes to a Nicaraguan Cooperative

Josh Fisher, High Point University

Abstract Based on ethnographic research conducted in Nicaragua in 2007 during the early phases of the building of an industrial cotton spinning cooperative called Ge nesis, this article recounts an implementation of the Organization Workshop (OW), a largescale enterprise-building and employment-generation workshop based on the ideas of Brazilian scholaractivists Clodomir Santos de Morais and Paulo Freire. The story of the Ge nesis OW, however, is not one of success. In fact, following the 40-day conscientization workshop, the cooperative entered into a period of upheaval, ultimately leading to the ousting of the cooperatives leadership. As a way of explaining some of the unexpected consequences of the OW, I point to the disjuncture between the actually existing social and organizational dynamics of Ge nesis before the implementation of the OW and the OWs model for them. Keywords: consciousness, capacitation, cooperatives, Organization Workshop, enterprise development Introduction Roger Durham grabbed his coffee mug, pushed away from his computer, and, for the second time on this particular October morning, began to navigate the mossy stepping stones leading away from the small, three-room concrete building that is the main ofce of the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua. A blue sedan pulled through the gate and parked next to an old rust-hulk structure, which was at one point a 1987 Chevy pickup truck. Shit, exhaled Roger, coming to a full stop. Hes early. As he started toward the car, a mustachioed man with a large, round face emerged, clutching a tattered leather briefcase, and Rogers demeanor suddenly changed. Through his white beard he ashed a friendly and relaxed smile, bellowing in natural Nicaraguan Spanish without a hint of the North Carolina accent of his native tongue: Tob as, co mo te va, amigo? Were just arranging things in the ofce. Can I organize a cup of coffee for you in the meantime? The Organization Workshop (OW) or, as it is called in Spanish, Laboratorio Organizacional del Terreno is a 40-day employment-generation and enterprisebuilding workshop that was born in Brazil in the Volume XXXI, Number 2

1960s, heavily shaped by Paulo Freires pedagogy, and that has since come to be widely implemented by development organizations as small as CSD and as large as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the UN Development Program (UNDP). Despite these credentials, however, the OW was not Rogers highest priority, nor even something that he knew very much about. Rather, it fell under the heading of distracting side project, which, whenever possible, he and his organization attempted to avoid and certainly would have in this case, too, if it were not for a favor collected upon by a colleague who happened to be invested in the model. Months before, CSD agreed to turn one of their main sustainable development initiatives a burgeoning cotton-spinning cooperative employing 45 men and women called Ge nesis into a test case for the rst OW in Nicaragua. Tob as arrival marked the workshops imminent inauguration. Although the details of what, exactly, the workshop was going to entail had long been lost amid a sea of emails and a carpet of sticky notes spread across the shared desk space in the small NGOs rather unpretentious ofce, the basic idea was clear enough. As Roger had understood it, the OW is a workshop that provides training in the ideology and practice of cooperativism by problematizing and dismantling the artisan consciousness (conciencia artesanal) of the cooperatives membership, equipping them instead with the more sophisticated and exible workers organizational consciousness (conciencia organizacional) dened, in contrast to the former, as the comprehensive technical, social, communicative, and organizational mentality that a group of people requires in order to work together and run a collectively owned enterprise. On the ground, this basic schematic ideally translates into short-term, relatively largescale workshops that emphasize an interactive and pragmatic pedagogy, following Freire, in which participants learn by doing. Proponents of the workshop claim that OWs method of organizational conscientization often referred to as capacitation (capacitacio n) during the workshop itself is not only the most compelling implementation of Freires idea of conscientization to date, expanding its scope beyond the limits of literacy into the vital realm of economic development, it is also a proven (Carmen 2000:47) solution for overcoming the many obstacles 71

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Anthropology of Work Review to a democratic organization of the workplace and for cultivating a cooperative culture of productivity (Porter 2000:25).1 To say that CSD staff members were unenthusiastic about the project is perhaps an understatement. While the small NGO of only eight permanent staff members welcomed experimentation with new, alternative, and especially grassroots approaches to economic development, believing the development industry to be highly problematic, at the same time their experiences in organizing and supporting a number of cooperatives in Nicaragua over the previous 15 years stirred in them a measure of skepticism toward any approach promising to be a magic bullet. This, of course, included the idea of instilling consciousness. From the perspective of CSD, organizing a cooperative is a very messy task that involves dealing in pragmatic terms with all of the issues that can arise within a heterogeneous group of people, not to mention those that sneak up unexpectedly from the outside. It was for this reason that Roger not-sosecretly expressed hesitation about the palabrer a (hot air) of consciousness as the OWs object of development. As an adherent of sustainable community development, it was not that he denied the importance of an equitable and democratic workplace indeed, he and his associates often championed workplace democracy as the only road to social sustainability. The problem was that he simply did not believe that it could be engineered by technicians who did not count themselves as members of the group undergoing transformation. As an outsider himself, he believed his time would be much better spent on the task of furnishing the cooperative with its own productive machinery (e.g., the cotton gin, for which CSD had for a solid year been trying to secure funding), without which even a democratic and worker-owned enterprise would still only exist as a shared idea. Thus, on the 1st of October 2007, as Tob as pulled his car through the gates, it hardly came as a surprise when, pointing to my higher tolerance for abstractly academic pursuits, Roger soon tracked me down to do some delegating. This article is based on my experiences working as the gerente te cnico (technical director) of the OW in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, a 40-day workshop in which the original, stated goal was to generate the knowledge, mentality, and spirit of cooperativism within the emerging industrial cotton-spinning cooperative called Ge nesis. In the capacity of the technical director, I was also solicited by the projects funders to conduct a formal assessment of the workshop, a task that I chose to approach using the ethnographic tools of participant observation and focused individual and group interviews. Of course, one of the consequences of my impromptu involvement with the OW was that Volume XXXI, Number 2 I could not go about the project with the kind of research design that many cultural anthropologists are accustomed to having in place well in advance of their eldwork. I do not see this as a signicant limitation. Rather, I learned about the model of the OW as cooperative members did, and my research questions emerged gradually from the numerous debates and conversations that I witnessed (and sometimes instigated), as well as from the questions and concerns that cooperative members themselves posed: What does a democratic and participatory enterprise an enterprise in which resources are held in common and governed in common need in order to succeed in the long run? If organization is frequently a barrier to the success of such enterprises, what is organizational consciousness that it can be instilled through a workshop? And what does a workshop like the OW provide that its participants are not already equipped to do on their own terms? In the long shot, the OW belongs to a larger set of projects of social transformation, often initiated from afar, currently involved in organizing groups of people into collectivities for the purposes of specic social, political, and economic causes. While many of these projects have historically drawn on state resources, such as in the case of large-scale economic development, others have depended on the wide reach of civil society initiatives like NGOs, and still others have taken the form of social movements, emerging from the level of the grassroots and calling to their aid shared identity or shared domains of lvarez et al. 1998). Many of these projects meaning (A also attempt, in one way or another, to intentionally modify the subjective states, or mentalities, of participants, whether in terms of the market principles of discipline, efciency, and competitiveness (Ong 2006:4), such as in the case of microlending (e.g., Karim 2008), or the cultivation of new political subjectivities through activism (e.g., Brodkin 2007). The OW stands out among many of the more powerful currents in contemporary politics and economics as a project that focuses squarely on economic issues of distribution, regardless of social identity, while seeking at the same time to build a kind of collective consciousness based in the management of collective resources (Carmen and Sobrado 2000). This article focuses on the active role of consciousness within the model of the OW as well as the complications and contradictions that arise when the concept, successfully and unsuccessfully, gains traction in social reality. In the rst part, I briey summarize the principles of the OW and its concept of consciousness that have informed its implementation over the past 40 years. In the second part, I move on to examine the broader social and cultural context in which the 72

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Anthropology of Work Review Ge nesis OW was staged. In sharp contrast to the OWs presumption that identiable mentalities of work form characteristic sets the world over, I show that Ge nesis cooperative members developed socially, culturally, and historically particular organizational strategies their own organizational style in the early stages of the enterprises formation, well prior to the OWs implementation of the paradigm of artisanal and organizational consciousness. Finally, in the third part, I give an ethnographic account of the OWs implementation, focusing especially on some of its unintended consequences. In the months following the workshop, that is, the cooperative entered into a period of upheaval. Amid accusations of graft and dishonesty, a large faction of Ge nesis members mobilized to successfully oust the cooperatives leadership who had been charged with the task of administering the OW. These cooperative members pointed to the leaderships use of the terminology of the workshop, including the language of consciousness (conciencia), as a wedge by which the leaders secured their status over and above the collectivity. Background: Consciousness and Organizational Consciousness One question that has repeatedly vexed development specialists has been whether poverty alleviation initiatives should chart their course through individualist entrepreneurial activity or the more complex and demanding route of large-scale, collective enterprises. In microcredit lending strategies, for example, the individual is often hailed as a gure who, but for lack of credit, could become a successful entrepreneur, and access to credit has even been elevated to the level of a basic human right (Yunus 2006). Backed in recent years by the broad ideological shift of neoliberalism, moreover, the notion that development is properly done by empowering individuals and families in the market is supported by the concomitant drive to liberate development from the ineffectuality of the state (Rocha and Cristoplos 1999; Snow and Buss 2001). At the same time, however, development specialists have also recognized the limitations of the small-scale lending model, incapable as it is of effecting structural change or giving rise to formal-sector enterprises that are large enough to carve out a competitive edge for themselves in the global marketplace (Gulli 1998). Some developers have therefore preferred the route of cluster and cooperation initiatives, which instead emphasize the importance of enhancing the position of whole groups (Colloredo-Mansfeld and Antrosio 2009). In microcredit, for example, development specialists work hard to establish group lending rules, which in theory draw on the social ties between borrowers in order to create stabilizing Volume XXXI, Number 2 structures of joint liability as group members exert social pressure on one another and ensure that payoffs reach a greater number of people (Rahman 2001; Abbink et al. 2006). In the broad spectrum of enterprise-building initiatives, the OW is a model that emphasizes the importance of large-scale rms. In fact, on the ground, workshops enlist at the very least 40 people, having no upper limit to the number of people who may participate. This scale is not, however, at the cost of a democratic methodology. Rather, the workshops methods register a general critique against mainstream development paradigms and the top-down organization of power and authority. The roots of the OW harken back to Clodomir Santos de Morais, the originator of the model, who was the former prison cellmate of Paulo Freire during the 1964 Brazilian coup. De Morais method, as reected in the OW, is indelibly marked by the friendship that the two scholar-activists subsequently formed. Similar to Freire (1970), who identied a problematic pedagogy as an oppressive instrument of consciousness, de Morais argues that one of the central problems in the development industry has been the fact that development projects are inscribed in concrete relations of power such that a privileged class of people (i.e., technicians or specialists) deprive target populations of control over the instruments of their own development (Carmen and Sobrado 2000). According to de Morais, following Freire, this is problematic because the approach tends to reproduce the hierarchies of the dominant social order hierarchies, moreover, that are largely responsible for the currently unequal distribution of wealth and power in the world. Without sustained intervention by technicians, de Morais also observes, development projects frequently fail because the intended beneciaries are either insufciently invested in the initiatives success or estranged from the organizational know-how that would allow them to sustain its success in the long term. Hence, the model of the OW is premised on the idea that, when people instead maintain control over the instruments of organization, they may themselves critically engage and transform the organizational conditions of their collective, working lives. They may undergo a fundamental change in thinking, and they may experience a renewed sense of ownership and control over their own futures. Along the lines of Freires critique of the banking concept of education (1970:58) the problematic dynamic in which the teacher is imagined to deposit knowledge in the learner by process of extension the OWs use of the terms capacitation (capacitacio n) and conscientization (concienciacio n) suggest that real development cannot consist in a mere transfer of skills (i.e., learning), capital (i.e., redistribution), or 73

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Anthropology of Work Review power (i.e., empowerment) from one party to another, whether by dint of social assistance or poverty alleviation. On the whole, these concepts form a set of problematic interventionalist, extensionalist, development-inducing strategies that Raff Carmen (1996) refers to as projectile projects. Development, in other words, needs to be reconsidered from the ground up, and capacitation, for de Morais, reects the idea that people may realize their own, heretofore untapped, organizational potential and take initiatives toward nding solutions to their own problems. Real power, like real development, is about genuine ownership, autonomy, and control, not only over the means of production but also over the instruments of the consciousness of the group. In the OW, then, organizational consciousness is not instilled (i.e., transferred to the target population) so much as it arises organically from the ideal conditions (Sobrado 2000:22) that the workshop creates. This all makes more sense when one rst considers the notion of consciousness that is at work in the OW. On the one hand, de Morais idea of consciousness is similar to a structural Marxist reading insofar as it posits a nearly direct line of causation with ones class position within a social formation. In fact, de Morais describes consciousness in terms of the mental organizational structures, or habits of thought, that one gains from the experience of ones daily work activities, which form characteristic sets: artisans are accustomed to being self-sufcient and involved in the production of a particular good from beginning to end; workers are accustomed to living by some form of work that involves a more or less complicated division of labor; and the lumpen neither work nor have the desire to work. Theoretically speaking, de Morias typology is informed by the idea of objective activity (Deyatelnost) rst developed by the Russian social psychology school of Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontev, wherein consciousness is conceptually enclosed within a dynamic envelope of subject-object interactions with material reality, that is, the Object (de Morais 1987; e.g., Wertsch 1981; Lave and Wenger 1991). De Morais idea of consciousness is, in other words, very far from the kind of antireductionist reading often embraced by anthropologists, such as that of Thompsons (1966, 1991), which recognizes a very great degree of historical and cultural contingency. Rather, de Morais seems to glide over the experiences of particular people with an attitude of inevitability, treating the resistance of artisans, for example, to the conceptual structures of the market as their basic inability to adapt. In fact, the relevance of the OW, for de Morais, is that the peasants problem is the very nature of their artisan (i.e., small producer activities), the fact that the organization of their work Volume XXXI, Number 2 is habitually simple (i.e., noncomplex), isolated (i.e., nonsocial), and self-sufcient (i.e., according to their own schedules). This kind of artisan consciousness would preclude them from running a factory even if they had at their disposal the necessary means of production, and so it follows that, in order to succeed in the marketplace, these artisans universally need to change their habits of thinking. The basic principle of the OW in this respect is that it is possible to intentionally modify the consciousness of the peasant and thus enable the cross-cultural transition from the artisanal (small producer) to the industrial (complex worker) mode (Sobrado 2000:23).2 On the ground, the OW thus attempts to eliminate all tendencies toward the vices of individualism, spontaneity, self-sufciency, and other artisanal behavioral forms, inimical as they are to efciency. Yet, following Freires pedagogy, the OW does not employ teachers to impart such lessons. Rather, it is the object (i.e., material conditions) which teaches and makes participants organizationally literate. In the words of Branco Correia, only in the total surrender of the bicycle to the learner can the capacitation in bicycle-riding be fully achieved (2000:46). On the one hand, it would seem that participants have at their disposal the tools of their own liberation and, given a framework in which they may critically approach the material and organizational conditions of their existence, are perfectly capable of effecting change in their own lives. On the other, however, it also seems to be the case that, according to de Morais, peasants are also somewhat antichange, trapped within the stubborn bad habits of thought and work (cf. Lewis 1966; Leacock 1971). How this apparent contradiction has played out in the praxis of the OW is of course not knowable in theoretical terms alone. Over the past 40 years, the OW has been staged dozens of times in settings as diverse as Central and South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe and with the active participation of international development organizations such as the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the ILO, and the UNDP (Carmen and Sobrado 2000). Some workshops have resulted in notable successes, such as Coopesilencio in Costa Rica and the Guaymas complex in Honduras, as well as many of the Landless Workers Movements (MST) claims in Brazil during the 1980s (Barrantes 1998; Sobrado 1999; Branco Correia 2000; Erazo 2000). Many other implementations of the OW have been doomed to obscurity, making it difcult to discern the true contribution of the model in the world of development. Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of the Ge nesis OW, however, is not its success or failure, narrowly dened, but rather the unintended consequences that have originated in large part from the space between the actual existing social and 74

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Anthropology of Work Review organizational dynamics in the Ge nesis cooperative before the workshop, on the one hand, and the OWs model for those dynamics, on the other. Indeed, the label of artisan, like some Weberian ideal-type run amok, was never a good account of the mentalities or habits of these Ge nesis cooperative members, and it is doubtful that such simplistic categorizations have ever related the complexities of consciousness anywhere. Instead, much like the vulgar Marxisms, the Ge nesis OW tended to ignore these social, cultural, and historical specicities to atten, in effect, the many historical dimensions of the interplay between social, cultural, and material existence. In what follows, I provide an ethnographic account of the early stages of the Ge nesis cooperative starting in 2006 with an eye toward accounting for the organizational knowledge, even mentality that members gained. With this necessary background, I then move on to an account of the OWs implementation in October and November of 2007. The Origins of Ge nesis A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. [Marx [1867] 1930:178] Ge nesis is the second cooperative enterprise project initiated by CSD and based on the philosophy that the means of production should be democratically held in common by its workers. From CSDs perspective, the principal and immediate objective of this project was to generate a sustainable, if relatively small, source of employment for the municipality of Ciudad Sandino. When Ge nesis was formally inaugurated in December 2006, it consisted of a group of 18 women from Ciudad Sandino whom CSD had recruited to be the founding members. Although the socias, as cooperative members are termed, would eventually gain full administrative control and ownership, the role of the NGO in the early stages of the enterprise was to provide the necessary training, legal and organizational support, and start-up capital in the form of low-interest loans. Based on a constantly evolving template that was rst generated in the NGOs original cooperative project, an industrial sewing cooperative, CSD envisioned socias as doing the bulk of the legwork in building the cooperative from the ground up, in the process of which the socias would learn by trial and error, rather than simulation, to develop effective administrative, managerial, and decision-making structures for their future cooperative. Volume XXXI, Number 2 This meant that, while the NGO established the broad guidelines and conditions for membership in the cooperative for example, that each hour of work would contribute a predetermined amount of social capital toward the buy-in of US$500 the task of constructing the spinning plant facility fell to the socias themselves. The original members of the cooperative comprised a group of women ranging in age from 18 to 80 who claimed a diverse range of political and social identities. They possessed various professional, preprofessional, and other specialized skills and experiences. And, coming from many different socioeconomic and class situations, they ultimately had many different reasons for wanting to be part of the project. Even before they were part of Ge nesis, let alone participants in the OW, it is certainly safe to say that they did not possess a consciousnesses that could be so narrowly dened as artisanal or individualistic. For one, as mothers [and heads of household], remarked Jasmine, a Ge nesis socia, We know how to organize. We cook, we clean, we manage the kids, and we try to make ends meet when we need to. You have to be organized in order manage all of the tasks of the day. Sometimes its impossible to do it all by yourself, so you also have to nd support in other people. Other socias gained important organizational and leadership knowledge while enlisted in the Sandinista military during the 1979 revolution or the subsequent Contra War, participating in workers unions during the 1990s, or, in the case of one member, employment as a lawyer for the national police. The initial months of Ge nesis precooperative phase solidied that organizational knowledge while also creating ample opportunity for new organizational experiences. While some of these may appear at rst glance to involve the navigation of mundane, bureaucratic activities, as Weber (1978:956) points out, all are central to the operation of large-scale enterprises in the political, administrative, and economic realm. The rst steps in long, arduous process occurred during the initial organizational meetings in January of 2007, which covered the business of electing the provisional executive board ( junta directiva), the purpose of which was to organize and direct the general memberships efforts. Recognizing that the cooperatives membership would eventually need to grow signicantly to meet the demands of a full-scale cotton spinning plant, the juntas rst act was to canvass for new members in Ciudad Sandino. Lacking a central public forum, however, doing so required the organization of the groups efforts to go door to door or to arrange group informational meetings. Although the tools for 75

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Anthropology of Work Review accomplishing this were only a white board and a marker, around which they gathered at one members home, the act of drawing up a work plan while working around the responsibilities of each socia to the cooperative and home life was an immensely complicated undertaking. Moreover, while the tasks of setting up and running meetings and evaluating and screening prospective members were easy for some, others were forced to deal directly with personal limitations such as a fear of public speaking. The coordination of the sum of these endeavors, and the recognition that each was responsible for communicating with the group instead of making her own way, proved a valuable skill set as the project moved along. By the end of the month Ge nesis had expanded their membership to just under 50 socias, including a number of men.3 Although the labor thus far contributed toward each ones social capital (i.e., buy-in), they were nevertheless in the tenuous situation of working without direct remuneration. Socias therefore voted to form two shifts, each working half a day, to give individuals the exibility to be able to tend to other business. With this organization of time and with the junta coordinating the work divided between the two shifts, they began the physically intense labor of preparing the grounds for the facility. They cut down or uprooted trees and bushes using only small hatchets and machetes, hauled off mounds of trash and rusty scrap metal, and set up a small ofce and meeting place in the shade of a Guanacaste tree. An ongoing project during this time was also to produce the concrete blocks and losetas (long, concrete slabs) for the primary structure of the facility. This task was signicantly aided by the infrastructure left behind by a now-defunct concrete block-making enterprise (bloquera) that CSD had sponsored a decade before. Each of the two shifts divided up into three teams and established a rudimentary bloquera production line. With a tractor and trailer loaned by CSD, one team made trips to a dry riverbed known as La Trinidad, dug up sand, and hauled it back to the industrial complex. Another group mixed the appropriate proportions of sand, concrete, and water to make the block mixture. And yet another group operated the bloquera, a startlingly loud machine that compressed the mixture into eight-shaped blocks. Meanwhile, the junta performed the organizational role of prioritizing tasks, constructing long- and short-term work plans, and directing the groups efforts toward specic goals, making sure that the labor involved was divided up equitably. Yet, power operated in the other direction as well. In constant dialogue with the general membership, and upon constant (and publicly broadcast) threat of removal, the junta was not allowed to sequester themselves to the ofce and send out directives. Rather, they were Volume XXXI, Number 2 required to work side by side with everyone else. It is important to show that no one thinks of herself as more important than the others, explained Laya, the treasurer. We all do the same work and contribute the same amount. If this physical labor had a clearly dened endpoint, building the social structure of the cooperative was signicantly less straightforward. Those who had never before taken on leadership roles some of whom, in fact, had never held a formal job before found themselves directing the activities of 40 people. In so doing, they (successfully or unsuccessfully) learned how to be assertive without appearing ofcious. Others, including the men, found themselves in the unfamiliar position of taking directions from women in their community, forcing them, to some extent, to cease treating their coworkers as women and to understand them to possess a common membership and equal status. Of course, this did not work out for everyone involved. Five members dropped out during the rst 6 months and three more were ejected for being disruptive and divisive. Although there existed no single idiom in everyday parlance for the social transformation that they both initiated and experienced, socias frequently characterized the feelings of mutual respect for one another, regardless of individual political preferences, religious identities, or interpersonal differences, in terms of civic solidarity (solidaridad c vica). A group interview with eleven socias during August of 2007 sheds some light on the idea. Cecilia explained, The way we treat one another is based on mutual respect and professionalism. We do not pour our hearts out to one another or bring our problems from home to work, even though weve all invested our lives in this project. To this assertion Dalia responded: Civic solidarity is how one aligns oneself (alinearse) and ones attitudes toward the group, recognizing that, regardless of disagreements we might have, a common thread binds our fates together. Sometimes that thread may be strained by disagreements or outside factors, but weve learned that in order to make it strong we need to communicate and respect one another. In contrast to many discourses of consciousness, civic solidarity for these socias is not some individuated substance to be gained or acquired. Rather, it is a matter of aligning oneself (alinearse), in the reexive sense of the word, so that ones relationships are built on mutual respect and ones attitudes and outlooks are harmonious with those of others. As Cecilia pointed out, gaining a collective sense of civic ethic is not enough for solidarity in its own right. 76

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Anthropology of Work Review Individuals also have to adopt as part of their conception of themselves, and thus in terms of their orientation toward the group, a relational identication as a civic person: We each have our individual jobs in the cooperative, but we also have to understand that part of the job is a responsibility to other people in the cooperative. For many, the transformation of the landscape served as a symbol for the social transformation of the group. Out of a tangled, rubble-lled mess appeared a at, dusty area bearing the promise of future construction. Alicia summarized some of the views of her coworkers during a second group interview: We could visualize where the factory was going to be built . . . [pointing into the distance] the main entrance over there, and the factory oor over here. We are poor women, only a handful of us have a high school diploma. Up until now, we never thought it would possible to achieve such a thing . . . a factory that we own . . . in our lives. Echoes of Marxs architect abound in Alicias imagination of the factory as well as their collective capacity to own and run it. But while an architect, by virtue of self-consciousness, may erect a building in her imagination, realizing the building, giving it materiality, is a different matter altogether. The work of construction on the Ge nesis cooperative was an intensely social process that required a shared idea of what is going on, an effective and fair division of labor, an equitable scheme for remunerating labor, as well as a common understanding of the conditions of possibility, given resources like land and capital. Apart from the facility itself, the social experience of organizing a cooperative was further complicated by the drive to construct a democratic and participatory administrative structure based on an idea of common membership. Although the reality of the matter is of course innitely messier than can be easily summarized here, shot through with the many complexities and inequalities of everyday interaction, the model of cooperativism embraced by socias is one that seeks to avoid the systematic alienation from decision making and other creative activities that is so common for workers in conventional enterprises. In effect, part of becoming a cooperative member in this case, by contributing the labor required for the membership buy-in is the primary social process by which each socia comes to understand that she is (sometimes quite literally) an architect of the project. As Ariela told me in an interview in August of 2007: As a group, we are building our economic future. Everyone has the right to speak and be heard and make her opinions known. And as cooperative members it is important for all of us to listen. We Volume XXXI, Number 2 must reach consensus, our visions must be in harmony with one another.

Organizing the Organizers: Constructing a Model Workshop Roger and I greeted Tob as in the largest of the three rooms in CSDs main ofce, where he was awaiting the cup of coffee Roger had promised to him and carefully arranging his notepad, a stack of wellworn papers, and a blue binder on a wicker table with a thin, glass top. After some brief pleasantries, he launched into what seemed to be a prepared lecture on the OW, the intention of which was to prime us on the workshops philosophy, its basic set-up, and the highlights of its implementation over the years, pausing only occasionally for questions. When we resurfaced 45 minutes later, it occurred to me that Roger and the other CSD staff member who had been in attendance at the beginning of the meeting had both left the room to accept phone calls and had subsequently failed to return. Tob as and I chatted briey about my role as the technical director, about the differences between the OW and the Grameen Bank microcredit model, and about the institutional biases against small producers and individualized entrepreneurial activity that make them untenable in the open market, and he repeated his position that the more appropriate and effective solution to the structural problem of unemployment lay in the promise of large-scale enterprises. The Ge nesis cooperative, he continued, will provide a model case study for how consciousness-building, capacitation, is necessary for such an enterprise to succeed. Our next stop was the introductory meeting with the Ge nesis socias, which Tob as titled Organizing the Organizers (Organizar los Organizadores). For reasons still unknown to me, this meeting invited the participation of only the 12 members of the junta directiva, rather than the full membership of the cooperative. Under the tin roof of the bloquera, the junta assembled their multicolored plastic chairs in a semicircle opening up toward Tob as, who signaled the beginning of the meeting by opening up his blue notebook and laying out the basic principles of the workshop in much the same manner as he had done for me: that the organizational reigns would be handed over to the workshops participants; that the objective of the capacitation was open ended and was open to participants denition; and that the role of the facilitator was only to function as an intermediary, encouraging the active and critical reection of the participants. Although the messages were clear in and of themselves, how they were communicated seemed quite contradictory. During the meeting or afterward, 77

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Anthropology of Work Review Tob as asked no questions about the Ge nesis cooperative or its history, nor about the specic organizational experiences or skills that socias may have gained thus far. In other words, the concepts of organizational consciousness and conscientization were imparted to the socias, who were in turn positioned as possessing an artisanal consciousness, a mentality, he explained, that is fundamentally resistant to adapt on its own to more complicated contexts. In contrast to the message that he was there only to encourage the participants, moreover, his presumed role as an authority on artisan consciousness was further solidied when he proceeded to discuss his expertise in development, providing examples of the 25 years worth of OWs that he had staged as a facilitator. Taken as a whole, the rhetorical effect of this communicative event was to subsume all of the various contingencies, particularities, and processes that had thus far given form to Ge nesis under a model OW. Tob as then continued to explain that, as a matter of precedent, the structures of model OWs have typically broken down into one of two types. The course OW, on the one hand, works best for mass capacitations, including large-scale employment generation projects in urban communities. The enterprise OW, on the other hand, is run in the case of existing communities who seek organizational training. Normal circumstances for the Ge nesis OW, given the cooperatives long-term goals, would of course dictate the enterprise model. The problem, Tob as told the junta, recognizing that at least one condition of the OW its timing was not within the power of the socias to decide, was that the project was in such an early stage that it did not yet even have the bicycle of production, as it were, upon which socias were to be capacitated. In a move that left very little room for participants creative problem solving, he then proceeded to indicate that the course-style OW was the only choice available. The socias complied, and within the next half hour, with hands shooting up in the air one after another like a classroom, the group decided upon 12 courses to offer as part of the OW and identied family members, friends, or acquaintances whom they could hire with OW funds to teach courses ranging from brick making to electricity, carpentry, cooking, management, accounting, welding, design, beauty, and English language. These courses, they voted, would not only be open to the general membership of the cooperative but also to anyone from broader Ciudad Sandino community who wished to attend. Last but not least, embracing Tob ass entreaty for them to become the organizers of the workshop, the executive board made themselves the de facto leaders of the OW. It was only when the results of that Volume XXXI, Number 2 meeting were reported to the General Assembly the following day that most socias discovered, rst, that the allegedly open-ended workshop had already been organized, and, second, that they knew almost nothing about it. The majority of this meeting was then dedicated to answering a handful of questions on the OW: why certain classes had been chosen and not others, the relevance of the class to the cooperative, why the junta directiva did not consult the general membership, and who was going to be paid to teach these classes. Over the next 40 days, socias and community members, side by side, took classes of their own choosing. The junta, meanwhile, continued to operate under the now self-applied title of organizers, overseeing the implementation of these classes. One of many consequences of this sudden differentiation of roles was that the de facto nonorganizer socias were now grouped with the Ciudad Sandino community members. They found themselves in the position of being the recipients of lectures on the vices (vicios) of organization, the artisan mentality (conciencia artesanal), and of course the idea of gaining organizational consciousness (conciencia organizacional), now such a common term with the junta that it was part of their role as organizers to instill (inculcar), stimulate (estimular), or raise up (levantar) all in the transitive senses of these words. The OW also had disruptive effects in the administrative structure of the cooperative. Having regarded transparency as an important component of leadership, the junta had up to this point taken to spending the day working along the other socias, then retiring to the meeting area at the end of the work day where they would detail a work plan for the following day or week and discuss nances or any membership issues that may have arisen since the previous meeting. Sometimes going on for hours, these meetings were open to anyone who desired to bring an issue to their attention, check in on the junta, or simply sit and listen. As one socia put it, We watch them carefully because everywhere power breeds generalillos [little generals] . . . in our cooperative, the junta is where they should be, with la asamblea [the general assembly], not above them. This changed once the junta began to double as organizers of the OW. Per Tob ass suggestion, organizational meetings were closed to the public in order to avoid, as he put it, the encumbrance of every dissenting voice of the whole group. What was to Tob as a matter of efciency, however, was to others a sudden lack of transparency. Indeed, as Mar a put it, comparing the position of the socias to the community members also taking the OW classes, We have no more right to know what is going on in our cooperative than anyone else in Ciudad Sandino. 78

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Anthropology of Work Review In an ethnographic view, the discontentment of the socias with the junta directiva was nowhere more visible than in the whispers of small groups who congregated for lunch or those who walked home together, talking about their days encounters with junta members. For many of these socias the term organizational consciousness (conciencia organizacional) as conciencia in Spanish means both consciousness and conscience was the topic of a great many discussions and jokes. For example, the end of the OW was celebrated by a work fair (fer a del trabajo), in which class-goers were encouraged to show off their new skills, such as being able to repair electrical devices, to build a wooden table or chair, or to use a computer. Afterwards, I accompanied a group to celebrate at the local cantina, and in what turned out to be a late and drunken night, one socia was inspired to parody the popular radio song, Conciencia, by the Bronx-based bachata band Aventura. The new version, which was widely and surreptitiously repeated thereafter, reveals a measure of disdain for the language of consciousness and the perceived condescension of its use by the junta during the OW. The chorus line, Mi conciencia me domina, una voz a m me dice que tu eres inel (My conscience dominates me, a voice tells me that you are unfaithful) became Mi conciencia me domina, una voz a m me dice que somos lentos (My consciousness dominates me, a voice tells me that we are slow-witted). Likewise, esa voz tambie n me dice que mi vida es aburrida que cambie mi forma de ser (that voice also tells me that my life is boring, that I should change my way of being) became esa voz tambie n me dice que mi vida es inefectiva, tengo que cambiar mi forma de trabajar (that voice also tells me that my life is ineffective, I have to change my way of working). In the coming weeks, rumors of fraud and theft came to a head. General Assembly meetings resumed with the OWs conclusion, but, instead of being dedicated to planning construction, most of the discussion revolved around nepotism in selecting and paying teachers as well as the lack of transparency in accounting for the OWs funds, which had amounted to nearly US$30,000. That discussion, however, was cut short in early December of 2007 on a note of tension and uncertainty when socias left for their scheduled holiday vacation (which in Nicaragua is 4 weeks, covering La Pur sima in early December and Christmas). When they returned to work in January, the junta discovered that the comite de vigilancia (vigilance committee), a subcommittee within the General Assembly, had mobilized a majority of the socias to vote no condence in the junta and demand a nancial audit. The accusations of fraud and theft, even though they were never really substantiated, compelled three members of the original junta to drop out of the cooperative altogether. Volume XXXI, Number 2 In the months following the OW, trying to come to terms with the difference between the model OW and what had happened at Ge nesis, I decided to ask many of the remaining socias what they perceived the goal of the OW to have been and to what extent they though that it had succeeded or failed. The results demonstrate the great degree to which the socias had actually been dispossessed of the knowledge, language, and concepts of the workshop, thus empowering others to be its organizers. About half understood it to be about generating employment in the Ciudad Sandino community, the success of which was measured by the ability to take in some extra money on account of the new skills. The rest understood the OW to be a basic organizational training for the cooperative, but took issue with the distraction that it represented from the primary goal of getting the cooperative on its feet. Perhaps most noteworthy was the change in these individuals attitudes toward the cooperative, given the recent conicts. Whereas the general attitude the previous summer had been quite optimistic, three-quarters of the socias now expressed reluctance about either the organizational model of the cooperative in general, or, that the Ge nesis cooperative in particular would fail before even opening its doors a fear that was only exacerbated by the delay in the construction schedule for which the OW was responsible. With food prices on the rise in Nicaragua a larger event that was later termed the world food crisis Ge nesis socias were also feeling the pinch of the temporarily nonremunerative aspects of their cooperative work. In fact, in Ciudad Sandino markets, the prices of staples like rice and beans had doubled in only a year, forcing many socias with only one other stable household income to eliminate from their budgets nonessentials such as vegetables and fruit, laundry soap, or bus fare. In this context, working without pay in the cooperative was a heavy burden. By May, several more socias dropped out to search for work, while others decided to pursue outside work simultaneously. For example, some decided to outsource their buy-in labor to family members, friends, or neighbors at a fraction of the normal social capital rate while they pursued work elsewhere, thus allowing them to maintain their membership in the event of its success. Another group decided to pool resources and draw on some of their newly minted OW skills to start a small, informal bakery. For the newly elected junta directiva, this was of course a troubling development. Arguing that the process of being a cooperative member was as much a social as an economic issue, they decided to require all social capital labor to be performed by the person him or herself. Consequently, socias were torn between wanting to maintain their membership in the cooper79

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Anthropology of Work Review ative but, economically speaking, not being able to. In June of 2008, as a solution to that struggle, the junta and the general membership together voted to petition CSD, the funder of the project, to provide a temporary loan to match, in direct payment to the socias, any social capital value generated. As Herna n, the new treasurer of the cooperative, remarked, People need stability to think and to focus . . . Now that people can eat, we can get on with aligning ourselves [alinearnos] as a cooperative. Conclusion The successful management of communal resources is undoubtedly a central component of democratic, economic development (McCay and Acheson 1987; Acheson 1989; Ostrom 1990; Agrawal 2002). The question of how to do so, however how not only to generate those collectivities, collective resources, and governance structures in the rst place but also to manage them in the long term is innitely more complex. As an answer, the OW suggests the concept of organizational consciousness: that a group of people may, by way of intense, critical reection, come to an understanding about the social and material conditions of their existence and, in so doing, generate a mentality and according set of organizational practices adapted to those conditions. The question that I have posed in this article is, to put it simply, whether or not a workshop like the OW provides its participants with something they are not already equipped to do on their own terms. In so doing, it is necessary to ask: What is consciousness that it can feasibly be instilled through a workshop? Or, alternately, what is consciousness that it can shape the way a group of people work together for a common goal? Consciousness has enjoyed a great deal of explanatory power with regard to social movements lvarez et al. 1998) as well as economic transformation (A (Hobsbawm 1971), but at the same time it has undoubtedly suffered from disproportionately little concrete, critical denition. As such, is it simply a brickbat, or can it be made into a precise, conceptual tool? The case of the Ge nesis OW demonstrates some of the consequences of the disjuncture between socially, culturally, and historically mediated narratives of consciousness that cooperative members express in terms of aligning oneself (alinearse), on the one hand, and the abstract concept of concept of consciousness mobilized by the OW occupying, as it does, the narrow space of objective interactions with the material world on the other. In so doing, Ge nesis demonstrates that, while the language of consciousness may often function as a cornerstone of a movement or project to form a collectivity, it is also eminently clear that there is more complexity in the social world than is dreamt of in any one philosophy. Volume XXXI, Number 2 In that light, perhaps it is also true that the OW could benet from an expanded view of both organization and consciousness, one that recognizes, in addition to the specic habits of workers, the entrenched power relations between development agencies and target populations as well as between the organizers themselves. After all, there are as many ways to organize and maintain collective enterprises as there are to create stable sociomaterial relations. Notes
1 The Portuguese term conscientizac a o was introduced in Freire (1970) and has been translated to English as conscientization, which is the meaning intended here. The English term capacitation, likewise, derives from the Portuguese capacitac a o, and it is de Morais meaning that I use here (Carmen and Sobrado 2000). 2 De Morais is careful to point out that this is not to say that the ideological structures of organization that are typical to the small producer . . . [are not] excellent in their own right and in a non-conictual environment (Sobrado 2000:17). Artisanal consciousness is only valued as bad habits, deviations, or vices when transferred to the totally different that is, complex social organization. 3 Spanish collective nouns are typically masculine when they contain one or more male subjects, even if there are 50 females. I choose to use the term socias because cooperative members refer to their collectivity in such terms.

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DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1417.2010.01043.x

Volume XXXI, Number 2

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