The Relative Survival of Worker Cooperatives and Barriers to Their Creation

Olsen, Erik K.

doi:10.1108/s0885-3339(2013)0000014005

Cited by 27 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…In Europe, they outperformed their counterparts during and after the financial crisis (Birchall & Ketilson 2009). Similarly, recent studies find that US and Canadian cooperatives have longer survival rates and are more resilient than comparable small for-profit businesses (Olsen 2013, Abell 2014. Thus, cooperative growth appears to depend less on survival rates and more on barriers to entry-that is, whether the institutional conditions exist to support their adoption-particularly financing in the early years.…”

Section: Management and Corporate Governancementioning

confidence: 93%

“…The democratic governance model is more difficult to achieve and maintain over time compared to more hierarchical models. The model also sets limits to growth as members cannot sell shares to finance new ventures, they rely on loan finance, and they lack access to external finance (Olsen 2013, Diamantopoulos & Bourgeois 2014.…”

Section: Management and Corporate Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

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When Wall Street manages Main Street: Managerial dilemmas, sustainability, and inequality

Batt¹

2018

JBA

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Before the Great Recession, financialisation was a 'fringe' concept, but post-recession it moved into the mainstream. In this paper, I begin by reviewing the financial model of the firm, the managerial dilemmas it poses, why it is not sustainable, and why it has led to greater inequality. I then examine alternatives to the financial model-the less visible but important range of experiments in social innovation and institutional renewal that local and regional actors are pursuing to create more inclusive forms of productive enterprise. These experiments provide a testing ground for solutions that may later get to scale. They vary across different contexts, depending on the institutional points of leverage and resources that are available. They include reforms in three domains: labour market institutions, organisational governance, and social finance. The role of academic scholars in this period is to engage with these actors, build an empirical inventory of alternative approaches to productive enterprise, and develop an interdisciplinary analysis of potential models for sustainable and inclusive economies.

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Section: Management and Corporate Governancementioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Management and Corporate Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

When Wall Street manages Main Street: Managerial dilemmas, sustainability, and inequality

Batt¹

2018

JBA

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“…(Dastur 2012, p. 8). It has been recently shown that research in various countries about worker coops shows that the failure rate in the short-and medium-term of worker cooperatives is lower than conventional businesses (Olsen 2013). The worker cooperatives shown to be efficient run private firms with their own managerial hierarchy (Fields 2011, p. 83).…”

Section: Cooperativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Model of Just Tourism: A Proposal

Mtapuri

Giampiccoli

2020

Social Sciences

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Inequality is growing within and between countries. Tourism is a growing sector affecting lives, with a vibrancy of its own and malleable structures that can benefit a majority, if social justice and equality are the goals. Cooperatives are one of these structures, and have the potential to drive a development trajectory that delivers a just tourism. We define just tourism as a form of tourism that delivers the most benefits to its members—for themselves and by themselves—representing a form of accumulation from within. This article is based on secondary data and is a conceptual paper. It posits a coop hotel model, which harnesses the hope of spreading the cooperative model for its finer qualities of providing job security to workers, happiness, democratic participation, decision making functions, self-governance, empowerment, openness, retention of capital within the community, the pursuit of both economic social goals, resilience, and importantly, the emphasis on community contribution and matters of sustainability. Community-based tourism and cooperatives have interlocking values such as local control, local/self-management, and being steeped in the local context. The coop hotels model, which is the main contribution of this article, suggests the creation of mother hotel coops, with coop sisters and coop children in pursuit of social justice for a just tourism.

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“…Having a say in decision making enables workers to improve their working conditions. It can also foster worker loyalty and a willingness to make sacrifices to help the company weather storms better than similarly positioned conventional firms (see Olsen, ). For example, worker‐owners of Union Cab in Madison chose to give themselves a series of pay cuts to help the company cope with competition from TNCs, which had driven revenue down by 20% (Union Cab board member, interview with author, March 2017).…”

Section: The Taxi Co‐op Alternativementioning

confidence: 99%

Taxi co-ops versus Uber: Struggles for workplace democracy in the sharing economy

Borowiak

2019

Journal of Labor and Society

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Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft have drawn scrutiny for the way they have upended urban transportation systems and heightened the precarity of taxi drivers. Less attention has been paid to their implications for democratic workplaces. This article provides a comparative study of Uber and Lyft's impacts on taxi worker cooperatives in three cities: Philadelphia, Denver, and Austin. Drawing on interviews with drivers, regulators, and other transportation stakeholders, we observe three major effects. First, TNCs have opened doors for cooperatives by undercutting taxi oligopolies and lowering regulatory barriers to entry. Second, they have intensified market pressures that make it difficult for start‐up co‐ops to survive. Finally, competition from TNCs has led co‐ops to shift resources away from democratic decision making and toward financial bottom lines. These findings paint a complex picture of workplace democracy's potential and limits as a response to the sharing economy's competitive and neoliberal underbelly.

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The Relative Survival of Worker Cooperatives and Barriers to Their Creation

Cited by 27 publications

References 22 publications

When Wall Street manages Main Street: Managerial dilemmas, sustainability, and inequality

When Wall Street manages Main Street: Managerial dilemmas, sustainability, and inequality

Toward a Model of Just Tourism: A Proposal

Taxi co-ops versus Uber: Struggles for workplace democracy in the sharing economy

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