Zoe Wilen Brent Humanities and Social Science
Hotel Bauen: Consumer Tourism and the Cooperative
The growing cooperative movement in Argentina, emerging out of the economic crisis of 2001, presents an interesting opportunity to study the ways in which the cooperative is modeled and understood in the context of a capitalist economy. For two months I will look at the model put forth by the four-star Hotel Bauen. Specifically, I will examine how the cooperative is understood and how that understanding is affecting and affected by the consumer tourist market to which it caters. To this end, I will conduct a series of interviews and surveys to understand the effects of the relatively new cooperative structure of the hotel on the type of clientele that it attracts. As well as the ways that cooperativism as a practice and an ideology is shaped by the necessary commodification of its enterprise in order to secure a niche in a consumer tourist market.