Unpacking the Cooperative Ethos towards Re-imagining Organizational Purpose

Both management scholars and industry leaders have been calling for impact-focused approaches in relation to addressing grand societal and environmental challenges. In responding to the call for a more radical paradigm shift based on reconceptualizing purpose, we shed light on alternative forms of organizing and more particularly on cooperatives as an intrinsically collaborative and democratically governed organizational form. The question that drives our study is: how cooperatives as fluid social collectives enact organizational purpose through communicative acts and their modus operandi. To this end, we empirically draw on a corpus of data including interviews with 15 cooperative start-up owners and entrepreneurs from nine worker cooperatives across different sectors in Denmark. With the help of the theoretical construct of organizationality and the associated alterity notion, we explore fluid and latent forms of organizing as these are instantiated through cooperative ethos. Our findings illustrate that revisiting organizational purpose in practice entails altering the corporate status quo, prioritizing collective interests over self-interests, competitive advantage and profit maximization and making a different impact through responding to demands across boundaries.