Conference "Self-Management in Action: Worker Co-operatives and Employee-Owned Enterprises in Western Europe after 1945"

The United Nations declared 2012 the International Year of Co-operatives. As a consequence, in European business history, too, co-operatives attracted considerable attention. In the wake of an increasing interest in the history of consumption and in the mediating actors between consumers and producers in the market economies, studies on consumer co-operatives and their impact on consumer choice and consumption patterns followed. Producer co-operatives and democratically managed enterprises, however, suffered from the ‘death of the production paradigm’ in economic and social history. They have been thoroughly neglected by historical research in the recent past. It is this particular type of businesses in the secondary, industrial sector and their history that the conference will focus on: factories and workshops ‘under workers’ control’ or ‘producer co-operatives’, as they were mostly called until the 1970s. During the 1970s this model of employee-control and employee-ownership came to be known throughout Europe under the term of ‘self-management’ (‘Selbstverwaltung’, ‘autogestion’, etc.) Research into this largely disregarded and empirically diverse field can connect aspects of the business history of mostly small and medium sized industrial firms with a culturally informed history of production. Such research can investigate the history of the new social movements and their social visions with regard to their particular economic forms of political practice.