Internationalization of the Social and Solidarity Economy: The Discourse of Mondragon Cooperatives’ Managers

Theoretically bounded by a critical inquiry into post-WWII international development, specifically the decolonial perspective, and relying on critical discourse analysis, this study aims to investigate and explain how the Mondragon cooperatives, prominent actors in the Social and Solidarity Economy, address the home versus non-home discrepancy in internationalizing business activities. More precisely, using discourse data stemming from in-depth interviews with Mondragon’s internationalization managers, how they discursively construct and address their business being run in a cooperative way in the home region, yet in a conventional, capitalist way in their foreign subsidiaries. The main findings include the identification of Mondragon’s discourses for dealing with the discrepancy (Announcing, Justifying, and Addressing the discrepancy) and the strategies for discursive construction of the discrepancy (illustrating the entire economic realm through the binary cooperativism-versus-capitalism lens and “othering” the subsidiary workers).