Cooperative culture: Reconciling equality and difference in a multicultural women's cooperative

Too often, cooperative behavior amongst women has been treated as an ascribed, rather than an achieved, interactional attribute. This paper discusses how women with different personalities, political and cultural backgrounds accomplish cooperation. An analysis of discussions that took place amongst a group of women who were trying to organize themselves into a worker cooperative suggests that interactional guidelines for co‐ops derived from the experiences of the largely white, middle‐class leftist groups who are trying to develop a critique of mainstream institutional talk and hegemonic interactional norms are problematic when used with more heterogeneous groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of study ing oppositional institutions, and a critique of theoretical understandings of culture which conflate sharing a culture with having the same culture.