Economic Democracy
Virtual Community

Community co-chairs:

• Mark Kaswan
• Amit Ron
• Alfredo Carlos
• Craig Borowiak
• Tom Malleson

Contact information:

Mark Kaswan: mark.kaswan@utrgv.edu

Virtual Community member login

https://www.wpsanet.org/member/mem_vc.php

Mission:

The WPSA Virtual Community on Economic Democracy is committed to creating an energetic virtual community committed to advancing knowledge on economic democracy, broadly construed.

Economic democracy can be understood in multiple ways. For example:

• Understood as equality of condition, economic democracy refers to measures that are intended to address economic inequality and its precursors (e.g., various forms of marginalization and exclusion such as racism, sexism, etc.). This also includes the consideration of ways that economic inequality impacts the more formal systems of governance in democratic republics.
• Understood as a form of governance, economic democracy examines how democratic theories, principles, norms, and practices are applicable to the governance of economic institutions. This includes workplace democracy, worker governance, employee ownership, the cooperative movement, and the various forms that comprise the solidarity economy.
• Understood as an approach to community development, it embodies community wealth building strategies including everything from employee ownership to multi-stakeholder cooperatives to community ownership.

Importantly, we understand that this list is incomplete, and that all of these are interconnected in various ways–indeed, we see the connections between them as itself an important area of research. We welcome discussions about the meaning of the concept and suggestions for ways to expand it.

Vision:

In our regular meetings (typically one per month), we aspire to keep the conversation energized by rotating meeting facilitation and by varying the meeting format in response to community interests and needs. Sometimes our meetings revolve around a paper or project that a member wishes to workshop. Other times we invite members or guests (academic or community-based) to share their work and insights. Some meetings are devoted to analyzing a shared text (classic or contemporary). Still other times, we devote our meetings to simply conversing together about happenings in the world that bear on economic democracy. The aim is to follow the community’s energy where it takes us.

Values:

• We value interdisciplinarity. While the VCED is housed in an organization of political scientists, we welcome participation by scholars in economics, sociology, philosophy, feminist and gender studies, race and ethnic studies, geography, management, labor studies and other related fields.
• We value the full range of scholarly status, from advanced undergraduate and graduate students through full professors and active emeritus scholars.
• We value methodological pluralism. The VCED is open to interpretive, analytical, spatial, and normative theory; empirical research and analysis; and mixed methods.
• We value the voices of practitioners–people actively engaged in economic democracy projects–who bring perspectives forged by real-world experience to share with people doing scholarly work.
• We value diversity, recognizing that even a community dedicated to advancing equality and democracy still needs to take active steps to address the exclusion of members of marginalized communities.

Virtual Community Norms:

We commit to creating a welcoming, inclusive space where all participants are treated with respect and able to engage in open communication.

Regular meeting time:

Third Friday of every month from September to May at 4:00pm Eastern / 1:00pm Pacific / 9:00 PM GMT

Types of events planned:

We will have colloquia, reading groups, roundtables, open discussions, mentoring sessions, peer support groups, community-building meetings, and social/networking events.