Different together: How cooperative networks contribute to sustaining workers’ participation as an institutional differentiation

This conceptual article aims at understanding how unconventional organizations may maintain distinctive organizing norms, rules and practices over time despite various constraining factors stemming from the institutional environment. It proposes a framework of inward-outward identity work and legitimation that describes how workers’ co-operative networks may help workers’ co-operatives sustaining workers’ participation over time. It is argued that by mobilizing the identity collectively constructed by organizations in the network, and by justifying the institutional differentiation in front of external constituents, networks may alter the legitimacy judgments of audiences and mediate the salience of institutional demands. In particular, they may secure social acceptance and ensure the maintenance of the institutional differentiation over time.