For too long, cooperatives have been considered marginal players in the global economy, and as unrealistic venues for the aspirations of new and experienced members of the labour force. This marginalization shows in business, municipal and legal discussions, and curricula, where cooperative structures are rarely mentioned, let alone presented as viable options. Cooperatives at Work … Read More
This book is a collaborative effort of academics, researchers, and professionals from US, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, France, Spain, and Colombia. Its pages contribute to the construction of an economic democracy while promoting a movement that stimulates growth, strengthens businesses, contributes to improving wages and savings whilst dignifying workers and building social progress. Employee Ownership in … Read More
In 2001 Argentina experienced a massive economic crisis: businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and nearly half the population fell below the poverty line. In the midst of the crisis, Buenos Aires’s iconic twenty-story Hotel Bauen quietly closed its doors, forcing longtime hospitality workers out of their jobs. Rather than leaving the luxury hotel vacant, a … Read More
These resource slides are designed for teaching faculty who teach about organizational “alternatives” to dominant corporate and bureaucratic forms of organization. The slides include links to recommended books, films, organizational case studies, sample syllabi and other resources appropriate for a wide variety of college-level classes. Individual slides are tailored to specific classes, including Methods, Theory, … Read More
An urgent and deeply resonant case for the power of workplace democracy to restore balance between economy and society. What happens to a society—and a planet—when capitalism outgrows democracy? The tensions between democracy and capitalism are longstanding, and they have been laid bare by the social effects of COVID-19. The narrative of “essential workers” has … Read More
Employee ownership has attracted growing attention for its potential to improve economic outcomes for companies, workers, and the economy in general, and help reduce inequality. Over 100 studies across many countries indicate that employee ownership is generally linked to better productivity, pay, job stability, and firm survival—though the effects are dispersed and causation is difficult … Read More
In Co-operative Struggles, Denise Kasparian expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualize conflicts in the new worker co-operativism of the 21st century. After the depletion of neoliberal reforms at the dawn of the 21st century in Argentina, co-operativism gained momentum, mainly due to the recuperation of … Read More
Platform cooperatives make possible a more democratic digital economy. They offer an alternative to extractive “platform capitalism,” one based on cooperative principles such as democratic ownership and governance.
This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or conceptions of organizational possibilities, with a focus on collectivist-democratic organizations that operate in capitalist markets but place more authority and ownership in the hands of stakeholders other than shareholders. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees: Emphasize social values … Read More
As KKR, a private equity firm, prepared to take Gardner-Denver, one of its portfolio companies, public in mid-2017, a discussion arose on the Gardner-Denver board about the implications of granting approximately $110 million in equity to its global employee base as part of its innovative “broad-based employee ownership program.” KKR (formerly known as Kohlberg Kravis … Read More
In Workers ‘ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs or worker-recuperated enterprises), a workers ‘ occupy movement that surged at the turn-of-the-millennium in the thick of the country ‘s neoliberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and … Read More
Work organizations are commonly studied as sites that produce and reproduce inequality. But we know much less about how organizations promote equality. This article examines efforts to broaden access to power, opportunity, and resources in Hotel Bauen, a worker-recuperated business that was converted from a privately-owned company into a worker-run cooperative. Drawing on extensive ethnographic … Read More
Decades of feminist scholarship documents the persistence of gender inequality in work organizations. Yet few studies explicitly examine gender inequality in collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives. This article draws on the “theory of gendered organizations” to consider how gender operates in a worker-recovered cooperative in contemporary Argentina. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Hotel … Read More
After hearing so much about how employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) and other ownership plans in the U.S. transform companies, it seemed logical to think that other countries, like Mexico, should have similar incentive plans in place. This assumption, however, turned out to be incorrect….