Abstract
The recent studies on the Italian worker cooperatives in Japan generally have the tendency to be concentrated on those of the industrialized regions such as Emilia Romagna and other cities in the northern Italy, in consequence of being much interested in the close relationship between the cooperative movement and labour movement.
If we expect however that the cooperatives should have capacity to tackle some of the various problems which lie in front of us and could be one of “social inventions” as W.F. Whyte pointed out, it is necessary to recognize inevitability of outbreak of cooperative and of its development, based on the potential wants of inhabitants concerned and their imagination through everyday life.
At this moment, when we are confronted, also in Japan, with the problems of underemployment and/or that of unemployment, especially at the local cities, from which the factories and workshops attracted by the largest enterprises have been moving out to the other Asian countries, searching for cheaper personnel expenses, we are driven of necessity to establish by ourselves some alternative subjects of planning/realizing a regional socio-economy based on the convenience and necessity, which are inherently inquired by the people who are living at that area.
As the first step, on the hypothesis that the worker cooperatives are to be one of these initiatives, I would like to show the case study, by means of discussing the development of the women's worker cooperatives in Sardinia of the southern Italy, by which I would like to clarify the social elements and their processes to move towards the self-organizing socio-economy systems.
