5. Discussion and conclusions
The evidence gathered from the analysis shows that organizational cooperatives of Mondragon speak the lingua franca of conventional managerialism. Conversely, the discourses which emphasize the key values, and principles of cooperation and therefore industrial democracy in action, such as the democratization of employee–management relations (Cheney, 1999) or the mutual dependence of one on another in value creation processes (Jussila, Goel, & Tuominen, 2012), hardly make an appearance. From our perspective the use of the mentioned lingua franca of conventional managerialism in cooperative organizations is not questionable per se, notably when some specific programs associated to the mainstream managerial discourse – such as the TQM – might be easily identified with the core principles and values of cooperative organizations. But in the specialized literature of the field the distinguishing feature of cooperative organizations has been underlined and this is the idea under question in the light of the gathered evidences. For example, these findings would appear to be incompatible with many previous observations, such as that of Paton (2003), who stresses that cooperative organizations and other forms of organizations of the social economy operate in a different world of language and meaning than the conventional managerial discourse.As underlined by Roper and Cheney (2005)in the case of social entrepreneurship, cooperative organizations and other forms of alternative organizations (Trethewey and Ashcraft, 2004), language is a key component in the shift towards rationalization, as discourse acceptance precedes or runs in parallel with material acceptance. Thus, ifthe colonization ofthe social economy field by the language of business is accepted, the breakdown of barriers between the sectors becomes normalized (Roper and Cheney, 2005).
