Devenir entrepreneur(e) en coopérative d’activité et d’emploi. Les 1001 visages de l'émancipation.

Overview & Synopsis

Business and Employment Cooperatives (BEC) bring together autonomous workers, while allowing them to get a wage in an original manner. Members of the BECs, assisted by a support team, manage their own activities, which may be affiliated to different sectors (building, services to individuals, consulting and training, etc.) while being part of a collective and cooperative framework. This article examines the forms of emancipation experienced by these autonomous workers in BECs. By showing their individual expectations and aspirations, as well as the flexibility possible within BEC structures, this study demonstrates plural and contrasting experiences and emancipatory horizons. In doing so, it points out the need to go beyond the mere frameworks of employment (employee/self-employed) or semantics (designing oneself as an "entrepreneur") to comprehend these new grey zones of employment. Instead, we must grasp the mechanisms of subjective work commitments to understand individual and collective relationships to these contemporary dynamics of work.