A human factors approach to operating a small cooperative house in a college town

Cooperative housing is a collectively owned form of affordable housing that enables residents to increase shared quality of life through the decommodification of property. Through shared labor and self-governance, residents manage the legal, logistic, and day-to-day social challenges in starting and maintaining cooperatives. The goal of this thesis was to adapt the work system model to analyze a small cooperative housing case in a Midwest town and develop recommendations for barriers residents face in performing labor to operate their cooperative. I analyzed archival documentation and conducted six interviews with previous residents and a representative from their parent organization, then coded question-answer pairs to identify work system elements. I inductively coded text segments from interview answers with a skeptical peer review to define dimensions of barrier, facilitator, and strategy. Residents performed compulsory residential labor, assigned administrative labor roles, and voluntary ad hoc labor within the work system. I identified fifteen dimensions of barriers, strategies, and facilitators to this labor: accountability, chore load, community building, individual capacity, individual knowledge, landlord relationship, organizational conflict, (COVID-19) pandemic, personal crises, physical environment, recruitment and turnover, small house, tools and technology, task preference, and transition to non-profit management. Based on these findings, I recommend five actions: analyze workload, capacity, and experience through the year to balance priorities; delegate and get support for maintenance from parent organizations; reduce unassigned ad hoc tasks; reduce weekly loads in favor of workdays; and redistribute Coordinator Positions based on lease length. Given the participatory nature of self-governance within most cooperatives, a work system analysis to revisiting cooperative organizations will help explicitly identify what is facilitating their work, what strategies to make salient, and which barriers should be balanced or eliminated.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Systems & Entrepreneurial Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Chan, Angela Lilly

Contributors dc:contributor

• Wooldridge, Abigail R

• Cooperative Housing
• Affordable Housing
• Group Equity
• Sociotechnical System Design
• Work System Analysis

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Angela Chan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121556

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121556