Collective governance in student housing cooperatives

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Student housing cooperatives, or co-ops, are hybrid organizations that combine bureaucratic and communitarian organizational logics. Despite the inherent tension between these dual ways of organizing communal life, student co-ops are remarkably long-lived intentional communities, lasting over decades of constantly shifting membership and leadership. Collective governance, through which student co-ops manage to survive as communitarian projects in bureaucratic organizations, is the central phenomenon of interest in this study. How does the practice of collective governance in student co-ops enable students to negotiate between competing organizational forms and sustain a cooperative way of life? Through participant-observation of sixteen group decision-making meetings in two student co-ops, I depict the practice of collective governance in student co-ops as constituted in two parallel processes: managerial decision-making and collective decision-making. These systems reflect the hybridization of bureaucracy and communitarianism into a dynamic organizational form centered on negotiation and compromise. These findings suggest that while bureaucracy and communitarianism may be incompatible organizational logics, structured efforts toward compromise between them can itself be the basis for robust communal projects.

Type of resource	text
Date created	June 6, 2014

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/xs377rx0192

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Kindel, Alexander T. (2014). Collective governance in student housing cooperatives. (Unpublished undergraduate honors thesis). Stanford University, Stanford CA.

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education

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