Alex Kindel Honors Thesis

45 Pages·2014·0.3 MB·English

by  Alex Kindel

Stanford University
Graduate School of Education

UNDERGRADUATE HONORS

Collective governance in student housing cooperatives

Alexander T. Kindel

May 2014

A Thesis in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for Undergraduate Honors

Approvals:

Honors Program Director: ____________________________________
Deborah Stipek, Ph.D.

Honors Advisor: ___________________________________
Mitchell Stevens, Ph.D.
Abstract

Student housing cooperatives, or co-ops, are hybrid organizations that combine
bureaucratic and communitarian organizational logics. Despite the inherent tension between
these dual ways of organizing communal life, student co-ops are remarkably long-lived
intentional communities, lasting over decades of constantly shifting membership and leadership.
Collective governance, through which student co-ops manage to survive as communitarian
projects in bureaucratic organizations, is the central phenomenon of interest in this study. How
does the practice of collective governance in student co-ops enable students to negotiate between
competing organizational forms and sustain a cooperative way of life? Through participant-
observation of sixteen group decision-making meetings in two student co-ops, I depict the
practice of collective governance in student co-ops as constituted in two parallel processes:
managerial decision-making and collective decision-making. These systems reflect the
hybridization of bureaucracy and communitarianism into a dynamic organizational form centered
on negotiation and compromise. These findings suggest that while bureaucracy and
communitarianism may be incompatible organizational logics, structured efforts toward
compromise between them can itself be the basis for robust communal projects.
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the immense trust that Kingman and
Columbae placed in me as a researcher. Thank you for inviting me into your communities,
feeding me unfailingly delicious meals, and teaching me more about cooperative living than I
could have ever anticipated.
I could never have finished this thesis without the intellectual guidance of my advisors
and mentors. I am particularly indebted to Mitchell Stevens, who introduced me to different
ways of thinking about cooperative living and inspired me to think analytically at every stage of
the research process. I also want to thank Deborah Stipek, for critically evaluating my ideas and
challenging me to think more rigorously; Jesse Foster, for providing feedback and support
throughout the process; and Jennifer Wolf, for introducing me to qualitative research and
inspiring me to study education.
I want to give special thanks to my parents, Tom and Micki Kindel, as well as my
siblings Aimee, Heather, and Nathan—I am incredibly lucky to have your unconditional support
and love in all that I do, and I am grateful that I can continue to learn from you.
Finally, I want to thank Elizabeth Matus, who introduced me to cooperative living and
without whom I would never have thought to write this thesis.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Research summary .......................................................................................................................... 5
Kingman ...................................................................................................................................... 6
Columbae .................................................................................................................................... 7
Methods ....................................................................................................................................... 8
Findings......................................................................................................................................... 11
Managerial decision-making .................................................................................................... 12
Collective decision-making ....................................................................................................... 18
Membership............................................................................................................................... 25
Discussion ..................................................................................................................................... 35
References ..................................................................................................................................... 40

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Introduction
On March 13, 2014, the Berkeley Student Cooperative voted to convert Cloyne Court, a
student-run cooperative house, into a substance-free academic theme house. To achieve this
transformation, the BSC’s proposal included a near-complete removal of Cloyne’s current
membership; the proposal stipulated that all but one of its members were prohibited from
continuing to live in the co-op. While Cloyne would still be run cooperatively by students, the
proposal represented an overarching change in the culture that Cloyne’s current membership had
organically established. To call this a controversial decision would be to radically understate the
situation; the proposal was debated by over two hundred BSC members, mostly undergraduates,
for more than ten hours before the final decision was made.
This thesis is about the relationship between communities like Cloyne and organizations
like the BSC. While student co-ops share many similarities with other kinds of communal living,
their close relationship to other organizations requires closer attention. To some extent, all
intentional communities are characterized by “a dynamic relationship between intentional
community and the host society” (Redekop 1976). What makes student co-ops distinct from
other communal forms, however, is the degree to which their survival is predicated on formal
relationships with other non-communitarian organizations. Because their members are primarily
undergraduates, who only stay for a couple of years at most before moving out, student co-ops
experience complete overturn in membership and leadership faster than is typical for intentional
communities. Moreover, because they are made up of a transient group of students, student co-
ops have very little power to acquire or maintain the material resources (e.g. real estate) needed
to sustain themselves. Student co-ops therefore rely on larger institutions, including universities
and other 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, to provide an organizational infrastructure capable
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of sustaining the cooperative way of life. In other words, student co-ops are not simply
independent communitarian projects—they are also subject to direct oversight and bureaucratic
administration by student housing organizations.
This organizational situation reflects what anthropologist John Bennett has described as
“paradoxes” of communitarianism, or, the “intersection of communitarian principles and
practices with the external social reality” (Bennett 1975). There are two distinct ways of
organizing at work in student co-ops, each with their own internally consistent logic. As
communes, student co-ops strive to take a communitarian approach to the organization of
everyday life. However, their communitarian aims are always balanced with the requirements
and exigencies of bureaucratic organization that emerge from administrative oversight. Student
co-ops are distinctively characterized by this blending of organizational logics; they are a kind of
hybrid organization, maintained through a combination of bureaucratic and communitarian ways
of structuring everyday life.
As the term “paradox” suggests, the hybridization of bureaucratic and communitarian
ways of organizing is not an easy task. In reality, the relationship between these dual
organizational logics is problematic, unstable, and constantly in flux. In his theorization about
bureaucracy, Max Weber (1946) noted that “bureaucracy is the means of carrying ‘community
action’ over into rationally ordered ‘societal action.’ … Under otherwise equal conditions, a
‘societal action,’ which is methodically ordered and led, is superior to every resistance of ‘mass’
or even of ‘communal action.’” In other words, Weber suggests that bureaucratic organization is
fundamentally at odds with communitarian organization, and in most cases supersedes it in the
establishment of social structure. Consequently, to maintain a communitarian project within a
bureaucratic organization is a particularly challenging task, one which faces students with
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particular kinds of collective problems. Indeed, living cooperatively with others is far from a
simple proposition. Making a communal lifestyle work requires students to participate regularly
in everyday household tasks, often including cooking communal meals, cleaning up common
areas, and participating in collective decision-making meetings. When problems come up, they
are typically logistical in nature, and in many cases involve discussions about everyday facts of
life: what food the co-op eats, who lives in which rooms, etc. As in all communal projects,
however, the basic acts of everyday living are fundamentally ideological; “people really do
attempt to turn their ideals into organizational reality” (Stevens 2001). Disagreements in student
co-ops are never simply about minor details like food or membership—they reveal the ideals that
members want the communal project to represent.
To resolve ideological differences, students must actively work toward partial solutions
in order to maintain the communal project. Bennett Berger’s examination of ideological work in
intentional communities provides a useful framework for understanding how communes go
about addressing these issues. Berger writes that “when problems or crises like these occur… a
variety of solutions are conceivable (although solutions is probably not the right word since these
problems are seldom clearly solved—“negotiations” may be a better word)” (Berger 1981:21).
Berger’s larger point here is that the problems that communes face often do not have an objective
solution; nonetheless, they must be addressed. To do so, Berger writes, “a group may
accommodate its beliefs to the circumstances it cannot alter, while manipulating those it can to
achieve the best bargain it can get” (Berger 1981:21). Because student co-ops are characterized
by two foundationally incompatible ways of organizing, as Weber suggests, this process of
accommodation is of particular theoretical interest. In general, communes survive through
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ideological compromise, but in student co-ops, compromise also reflects a process of
accommodation between two distinct organizational forms.
My aim in this study is to show how student co-ops negotiate toward organizational
compromise through formalized systems of collective governance. As I will show, the specific
procedures through which student co-ops negotiate this organizational relationship vary based on
the particular characteristics of individual communities and the student housing organizations
that administer them. That is, student co-ops do not simply follow an organizational script.
Rather, each “strikes its own balance and makes its own choices about what it will consider
important and what it will give up” (Kanter 1973). At every student co-op, there is always work
to be done in figuring out how exactly these dual organizational logics should relate, and what
trade-offs members are willing to accept to make cooperative life work.
For an ideologically diverse, constantly changing group of students, maintaining a
communal way of life under these circumstances is a remarkable feat of cooperation. Collective
governance does more than “give students a voice in the operations of the environment in which
they spend their time” (NASCO 1990). Fundamentally, collective governance enables students to
hybridize two conflicting organizational logics. This is a remarkably successful strategy for
promoting the survival of student co-ops; currently, more than 12,000 students live in
approximately 250 student co-ops throughout North America (SWOPSI 1990). The survival of
these organizations is not coincidental—it is the result of ongoing negotiation between
bureaucracy and communitarianism through collective governance. How does the practice of
collective governance in student co-ops enable students to negotiate between competing
organizational forms and sustain a cooperative way of life?
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Research summary
The organizational structure I depict in this thesis is based on case studies of two student
co-ops: Kingman, a co-op in the Berkeley Student Cooperative; and Columbae, a co-op at
Stanford University. I have chosen not to use pseudonyms to refer to these co-ops because their
names are not merely aesthetic or arbitrary choices; rather, they represent the historical and
ideological origins of the communal projects under examination in this thesis. Kingman is named
after Harry Kingman, a YMCA director instrumental to the founding of the BSC as a low-cost
student housing cooperative during the Great Depression (BSC 2013). Columbae’s name
originated from the Latin word for doves, reflecting its guiding theme of nonviolent social
change (Dickinson 1971). These histories are essential to my analysis—it would not be possible
to explain the organizational logics I observed at Kingman and Columbae without reference to
their founding purposes.
I selected these cases primarily to contrast the institutional contexts in which student co-
ops are situated. Because they are part of the same administrative system, two co-ops at a single
university will share some organizational peculiarities, even if their members feel that their
internal cultures are very different. For example, the manager roles at Columbae are very similar
to the manager roles at other student co-ops at Stanford. So, to get at the relationship between
institution and co-op, it was necessary for each case to be a co-op at a different university. Given
this comparison, I also sought to study co-ops that used different systems for group decision-
making, in order to compare different kinds of collective governance. As I will describe later, a
co-op’s approach to decision-making is far from coincidental; it reflects particular choices about
how cooperative life should be structured.
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Kingman
Kingman is a 49-member student co-op in the Berkeley Student Cooperative (BSC), a
501(c)(3) nonprofit organization which runs seventeen student co-ops in Berkeley, CA. The BSC
originated during the Great Depression, aiming to “provide low cost cooperative student
housing” (BSC 2013). Although a large proportion of the students who live in the BSC are
students at UC Berkeley, the two organizations are independent, and students at any
postsecondary institution are eligible to live in Kingman. During the contract period in which
this study took place, there were students from local community colleges, students visiting on J-1
visas, and students from other universities in the United States. Kingman residents occasionally
refer to the co-op as “Toad Hall,” and correspondingly, sometimes call themselves “Toads.”
In Kingman, and in the BSC more generally, members are required to fulfill a set of
workshift requirements. This involves some combination of cooking for communal dinners,
cleaning common spaces (kitchen, bathrooms), house maintenance/improvement tasks, and other
miscellaneous jobs. Some members are chosen by group elections to serve in manager positions
(e.g. Workshift Manager, House Manager); managers fulfill additional responsibilities in
exchange for monetary compensation and/or workshift hours. While managers take care of some
house-level administrative tasks, the BSC (composed of full-time professionals and elected
student officials) handles the majority of the administrative work that goes into operating the co-
ops, including bookkeeping and building inspections.
In the BSC, group decision-making meetings are referred to as council. At council,
managers and members are given the opportunity to make announcements to the group, and any
member or manager is able to bring a motion for the group’s consideration. Motions are decided
by a majority-rule voting system, and discussion on motions loosely follows Roberts’ rules of
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