Dis/Agreement and Recounting Variety in a Self-Managing Cola Collective

This article explores the facilitation of productive disagreement within democratic spaces. The research shows that designing democratic organisations around both processes of agreement and spaces of disagreement go hand-in-hand as two sides of developing viable and emancipatory democratic organisations. The latter create the conditions for participants to intervene within power structures and for collectivists to emancipate themselves from organisational conventions. Furthermore, by mapping this opposition onto Beer’s classic variety engineering loop, a novel cybernetic political category is revealed: variety recounting. The findings emerge from a three-year investigation of a democratic cola-collective named Premium Collective, and studies how their unique organisational strategies and policies assisted in their survival of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their use of an open, digital forum allowed them to overcome the challenges of the pandemic despite the beverage industry being among the hardest hit by the virus. This work provides an advance in the design of participatory cybernetics, showing that organisational viability and emancipatory democratic practice are not only mutually compatible, but are tightly interlinked.