Clinical Sociology in the Service of Social Change: The Experience of Developing Worker Management

In this article I will discuss my experiences over the last six years in working to develop democratically organized, self-managed businesses, and describe what I learned in the process. Self-management refers to an organizational system in which working members both own and control their own business, using a democratic method involving one worker-one vote. My experiences span two organizations, the first a national organization which I shall call the National Self-Management Organization (NSMO), the second a regional organization which I shall call the Regional Self-Management Organization (RSMO)

Forgotten Plotlanders: Learning from the survival of lost informal housing in the UK.

Colin Ward’s discourses on the arcadian landscape of ‘plotlander’ housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today the forgotten history of ‘plotlander’ housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This papers observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offers a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernised world