A worker cooperative takeover: Organizing radical transformation according to Lefebvre's experimental utopia

This article analyzes the seemingly impossible, radical transformation of a factory into a worker cooperative, despite a multinational corporation’s refusal to cede its brand and announced plans to shut down the factory and relocate its production. With a hybrid ethnographic approach, the current research addresses the interwoven (holistic) spatial and temporal dynamics of one such transformation. The resulting study builds on and expands Lefebvre’s concept of experimental utopia to the organization studies domain to clarify the process of radical transformation and the conditions in which a new social space gets produced within a collective survival context. Furthermore, this study introduces the notion of mechanotransducer, which is essential to the production of a worker cooperative. The results prioritize the value of a holistic spatio-temporal conceptualization of utopia, in accordance with a Lefebvrian perspective.