This thesis seeks to understand how collectivist-democratic organizing is sustained over time and scale in worker cooperatives based in the UK. This research builds on and contributes to key developments in the contemporary literature by focusing on the (up to now) relatively unexplored phenomenon of prefigurative democratic organizing at the boundary between smaller-scale collectivist-democratic organizations and larger scale representative-bureaucratic organizations. A constructivist grounded theory approach was adopted to generate novel conceptual and empirical understandings based on a comparative case study of four worker cooperatives in the UK, all of which had survived for more than twenty years and had grown beyond fifty full members. Data were captured from five extended interviews with ‘cooperative movement actors’ and forty interviews with worker-members and were supported by fieldnotes from site visits and participant observation where permitted. Data analysis involved batch-coding, memo-writing, and the development of categories, concepts, and theoretical contributions. Empirical findings are presented in the first instance across three types of ‘space’ (interpersonal, headspace, and physical space) and subsequently in greater depth across four levels of organizing (individual, cultural, structural, and decision-making).

Through this analysis a conceptual framework is woven from three threads; the conception of organizations as landscapes and communities of practice, the philosophical underpinnings of relational process ontology, and the positioning of organizing as an ‘integrative process’. The central argument of this thesis is that members are engaged in an ongoing search for the ‘Goldilocks zone’: a point of perfect ‘relevance’ of practice and structure. Members experience ‘relevance’ through the ‘creaking’ and ‘slipping’ between points of variable quality in cooperative prefiguration. The main contribution of this thesis is to further develop appreciation of nuance and imperfection in exploring, understanding, and practising democratic organizing. Going beyond arguing what is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ cooperation, it suggests that organizing cannot move closer to the ‘Goldilocks zone’ without moving between and through more-or-less ‘cooperative’ practice. Cultivating ‘relevance’ is a never-ending dance of engaging, aligning, and (re)imagining in the pursuit of an ever-evolving goal.