This incisive Handbook provides a global update on the state of knowledge in cooperatives and mutuals, expertly describing future directions for research and education. Showcasing extensive discussions of cooperative theory, Matthew Elliott and Michael Boland, and the contributors assess cooperatives' social, economic and environmental effects and analyse the impact of regional and cultural features that make cooperatives unique. The insightful chapters are organised into key sections, including theory, organisation, governance and cross-sector applications, and introduce a relevant theory, framework, special topic or mini case on cooperatives and mutuals. The Handbook also examines the role of leaders, members and producers in supply chain governance and looks at different forms of cooperatives and mutuals and their prominence in the economy. Offering an excellent in-depth read, this Handbook will be a vital additional resource for economics scholars and researchers, and those teaching and working on cooperatives and mutualism. It will also prove helpful for conducting leader and member education programs.

This book revolves around the idea that capitalism is not a democratic system and that a system of producer cooperatives, or democratically managed enterprises, gives rise to a new mode of production which is authentically socialist in essence and fully consistent with the ultimate rationale underlying Marx's theoretical approach. The author argues that the cooperative firm system outlined in this book offers a rich array of non-economic benefits that justify its classification as a 'genuinely socialist' entity, with real potential for achieving true economic democracy. This book will be required reading for all economists who are not content with the current capitalist economic system, and yet will still provide intriguing and thought-provoking insights for those who are.

The Economic Theory of Socialism and the Labour-Managed Firm focuses on market socialism and the relevant debate among economic theorists. It argues that market socialism is the only rational form of socialism and that market socialism with labour-managed firms is by far the best form of market socialism. The book begins with a critical review of the contributions to the economic theory of socialism. The second part discusses the economic theory of labour-managed firms and pays particular attention to the adverse labour-supply curve, underinvestment, monitoring and the separation of ownership and control. The final chapters discuss problems such as the control of economic activity in labour-managed firms, worker motivation and incentives. This book will be of particular use to students and academics interested in comparative economic systems and to specialists in politics and sociology with an interest in alternative forms of economic organization.

Historically, the relationship between towns and surrounding farm families has ranged from suspicion to benign neglect. This book shows that rural America can be revived by uniting the interests of both farm and non-farm populations through value-added enterprises, especially those based on the principles of New Generation Cooperatives (NGCs). Instead of sending agricultural commodities out of the region to be processed, farmers and communities can collaborate to process the commodities locally, thereby adding value to the local rural economy.

In this edited volume, nationally recognized scholars discuss the on-going challenges to the agricultural sector such as declining farm subsidies and commodity prices, and the strategies used by rural communities to respond to economic decline. Specific attention is paid to the role of NGCs as a specific form of value-added agriculture which has helped some rural communities to prosper. The NGCs, however, extend well beyond traditional agriculture to include grocery stores, day care centers, and other businesses that have not always been profitable in small towns. The broader objective of the book is to show how increased collaboration among farm producers, small businesses, and community leaders can promote economic development in rural regions.

Adult Education contradicts the theorists and practitioners who claim that empowering organizations can only be created when those at the top decide to share power. The emancipating educational processes are the tools of those who work within systems whether the issue is literacy, civil rights or democracy in the workplace. The Adult Education movement has linked its mission to cultivating the growth of democratic processes. Those people who work in organizations and are trying to improve their understanding of how to reshape the organization into a democratic workplace will find this useful.

This volume of Research on Emotions in Organizations adds to the ongoing research stream on emotions in the workplace, focusing on service and the digital economy. Advances in digital technology have ushered us into what is referred to as industry 4.0 or the digital age. With it come opportunities to improve the methodologies we use to research and analyse emotions, to help people manage their emotions, as well as develop their socio-emotional skills. Industry 4.0 also poses challenges, such as assisting leaders and employees to acquire a digital mind set and maintaining positive human connections and relationships in the workplace. Emotional management skills and a service orientation have become an even higher priority. The chapters in this book offer a variety of research evidence and perspectives which explore how emotions will continue to be of central importance in the digital workplace. Emotions and Service in the Digital Age is divided into three parts: The Digital Age Adapting to the Digital Age Emotions and Care in the Digital Age

Berkshire Hathaway, the $300 billion conglomerate that Warren Buffett built, is among the world's largest and most famous corporations. Yet, for all its power and celebrity, few people understand Berkshire, and many assume it cannot survive without Buffett. This book proves that assumption wrong.

In a comprehensive portrait of the distinct corporate culture that unites and sustains Berkshire's fifty direct subsidiaries, Lawrence A. Cunningham unearths the traits that assure the conglomerate's perpetual prosperity. Riveting stories recount each subsidiary's origins, triumphs, and journey to Berkshire and reveal the strategies managers use to generate economic value from intangible values, such as thrift, integrity, entrepreneurship, autonomy, and a sense of permanence.

Rich with lessons for those wishing to profit from the Berkshire model, this engaging book is a valuable read for entrepreneurs, business owners, managers, and investors, and it makes an important resource for scholars of corporate stewardship. General readers will enjoy learning how an iconoclastic businessman transformed a struggling shirt company into a corporate fortress destined to be his lasting legacy.

The development of the welfare state has been accompanied by greater freedom being granted to workers in industrialized capitalist countries. The themes of this probing volume concern how governments, employers, trade unions, and workers have acted to promote economic growth and accountability with active industrial policies and forms of co-determination, worker self-management, and/or employee ownership. The book's essays address the key dimensions of economic, social, and political change in five industrial democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden. A major focus of the volume as a whole is on economic management and workplace reform in a variety of national settings. Managing Modern Capitalism is divided into three sections, covering strategies for industrial renewal, workplace democracy in practice and theory, and future perspectives. In the first section, each of the five countries are compared and contrasted in light of their attempts to stimulate economic growth and reduce unemployment under conditions of international interpendence of capital and markets. Country-by-country profiles highlight the second section, which also examines various forms of employee consultation, participation in managerial decisions, and ownership. The third section and conclusion evaluate prospective economic trends and workplace democracy in the capitalist nations. This book will be of interest to policymakers, scholars, and journalists, as well as to advanced students in political science, economics, history, and sociology.

The British consumer Co-operative movement pioneered the use of film for industrial and propaganda purposes. A powerful association of working-class consumers, the movement embraced the potential of cinema and used it to help articulate an ideology expounding the ideals of mutuality, equality, and democracy, and seeking to transform a capitalist society founded on individualism and selfish-help into the Co-operative Commonwealth. This book provides an extensive, detailed catalogue of more than 300 films relating to the movement. Technical details, credits, a synopsis, and historical and critical evaluations are given for each title. Numerous films, previously unknown or believed to be lost, have been traced.

The catalogue is prefaced by a substantial introductory essay which provides a contextual framework for a consideration of the movement and its use of film. The book is supplemented by a selection of articles, publications, and reports which appeared in the movement's contemporary press, and which reveal the genuine concern to use cinema to assist in the task of making Co-operators. This catalogue will be invaluable to students of social, labor, and business history and to film and media historians who wish to broaden their knowledge of non-commercial film. It also serves as a guide for contemporary filmmakers and television researchers to this extensive collection of archive film.

Volume 12 will consider the timely issue of entrepreneurship and family business. Papers consider the issues, problems, contexts, or processes that make a family firm more entrepreneurial. A representative, but by no means exhaustive, listing of relevant topics includes: the emergence and growth of family businesses, and founding conditions unique to family firms; maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit of the founding generation; the role of family in corporate entrepreneurship; the use of entrepreneurial policies, practices and strategies by family firms; outcomes attributable to differences between more and less entrepreneurial family firms; family firm versus non-family firm approaches to entrepreneurial decision making; entrepreneurial characteristics and practices across the generations of a family firm; entrepreneurship as an avenue to strategically renew family firms; and, the allocation of family-based resources to entrepreneurial endeavors.

This book contains an Open Access chapter Scholarship in management and strategy is paying increasing attention to the domain of aesthetics. Companies routinely make aesthetic choices and there is growing recognition that aesthetic considerations are fundamental for successful performance in competitive markets. Stylistically sophisticated products may appeal to demanding customers, yielding higher profit margins. Style and beauty can also be applied toward enriching organizational cultures, informing leadership visions or motivating employees to defy conventions in designing new products. Aesthetics and Style in Strategy constitutes the first systematic survey of the interface between the aesthetic and strategic domains. Motivated by the rise of aestheticism in contemporary culture, it lays the foundations for an "aesthetic" turn in strategy, which interrogates the use of aesthetic features as a source of competitive advantage and provides examples of connecting design and engineering, style and technology. The "aesthetic turn" is not simply about creating value, but about sharing value among employees and infusing organizational activities with a purpose that transcends principles of efficiency. Volume 42 of Advances in Strategic Management documents the variety of ways in which the useful and the beautiful can be brought together, making a valuable contribution to the sustainability of business in the 21st century.

At once a social history and anthropological study of the world's oldest voluntary collective farms, All or None is a story of how landless laborers joined together in Ravenna, Italy to acquire land, sometimes by occupying private land in what they called a "strike in reverse," and how they developed sophisticated land use plans, based not only on the goal of profit, but on the human value of providing work where none was available. It addresses the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusiness.

This book comes to terms with Marxism and its relationship to workers' self-management. David L. Prychitko offers a reinterpretation of Marx's vision of socialism by arguing that Marx's understanding of the praxis-nature of humankind led him to a utopian goal of decentralized socialism based on the total abolition of market exchange. The full development of workers' self-management of industry was to be accompanied by comprehensive planning of the socially owned means of production. Prychitko takes modern economists to task for paying too little attention to the implications of Marx's praxis philosophy and to the organizational consequences of abolishing private ownership and the market process. This abolition leads inevitably, he argues, to the development of hierarchical structures of state domination and power. This tension between democratic decentralization--workers' self-management--and central economic planning--which tends to destroy meaningful self-management--can be traced back to Marx himself. The failure of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has not dissuaded those who wish to keep Marx alive from pushing workers' self-management as a feasible enterprise in a free market system. Prychitko's volume does more than simply interpret the meaning of Marxism. It analyzes the tension between centralization and decentralization in contemporary theory and practice. The contemporary theory of self-managed socialism, put to much use in Yugoslavia, is critically assessed by Prychitko. After focusing on a case study of American barrel-making cooperatives that managed to compete well with traditional capitalist firms and survive an extraordinary degree of market competition, Prychitko concludes the book by speculating over the feasibility of worker-managed firms in a truly dynamic, rivalrous market setting. Marxism and Workers' Self-Management will be of great interest to scholars of Marx, political economy, social theory, and labor studies.

Ownership and decision-making are key issues in the economic restructuring taking place as economies struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, and technological change and globalization continue to place new demands on workers and firms. Corporate, labor, and policy leaders are increasingly recognizing the potential role of employee ownership, cooperatives, profit sharing, and other ways in which employees directly participate in decision-making and financial performance. This volume contains cutting-edge research on the causes and effects of financial and decision-making participation, including results from the United States, European Union, Russia, India, and Basque area of Spain, along with a unique laboratory experiment to probe the real-world findings. Along with consideration of standard economic outcomes are studies that examine job satisfaction in the largest U.S. worker cooperative, and firm survival among cooperatives and ESOP companies. In addition, there are theoretical and thought pieces on the meaning and value of employee ownership in a rapidly changing world economy.

"The financial crisis is destroying wealth but is also a remarkable opportunity to uncover the ways by which debt can be used to regulate the economic system. This book uses four case studies of cooperatives to give an in-depth analysis on how they have braved the crisis and continued to generate wealth"--

With a growing prominence of sophisticated econometric research in a much-expanded field of New Economics of Participation (NEP), it is of particular value to learn about real-world examples of participatory and labor-managed firms in the advanced market economies through extensive case studies. In this volume of Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms, the authors present such case studies. The real-world examples of participatory organizations described vividly in this volume will help researchers in NEP to design empirical strategies better, and to interpret their econometric results more sensibly. Furthermore, they will help policymakers and practitioners in their efforts to construct better public policy and design management practices.

During the events described in The Socialist Offensive the collective farms achieved a commanding position in the Soviet countryside. The emergence of the collective farm in 1929-30, discussed in the present volume, was a crucial stage in the formation of the Soviet system.

By the summer of 1929 Soviet industrialisation was well under way, but agriculture was in a profound crisis: in 1928 and 1929 grain to feed the towns was wrested from the peasants by force, and the twenty-five million individual peasant households lost the stimulus to extend or even to maintain their production. In the autumn of 1929 the Soviet Politburo, led by Stalin, launched its desperate effort to win the battle for agriculture by forcible collectivisation and by large-scale mechanisation. Simultaneously hundreds of thousands of kulaks (richer peasants) and recalcitrant peasants were expelled from their villages. This book tells the story of these events, as momentous in their impact on Russian history at the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and of the temporary retreat from collectivisation in the spring of 1930 in the face of peasant resistance. The crisis in the Communist Party which resulted from this upheaval, in the months preceding the XVI party congress in June 1930, is described in detail for the first time.

Siddharth Kara's "Sex Trafficking" has become a critical resource for its revelations into an unconscionable business, and its detailed analysis of the trade's immense economic benefits and human cost. This volume is Kara's second, explosive study of slavery, this time focusing on the deeply entrenched and wholly unjust system of bonded labor.

Drawing on eleven years of research in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, Kara delves into an ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery that ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world and generates profits that exceeded $17.6 billion in 2011. In addition to providing a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, Kara travels to the far reaches of South Asia, from cyclone-wracked southwestern Bangladesh to the Thar desert on the India-Pakistan border, to uncover the brutish realities of such industries as hand-woven-carpet making, tea and rice farming, construction, brick manufacture, and frozen-shrimp production. He describes the violent enslavement of millions of impoverished men, women, and children who toil in the production of numerous products at minimal cost to the global market. He also follows supply chains directly to Western consumers, vividly connecting regional bonded labor practices to the appetites of the world. Kara's pioneering analysis encompasses human trafficking, child labor, and global security, and he concludes with specific initiatives to eliminate the system of bonded labor from South Asia once and for all.

Today's views of leadership and management have significantly expanded to incorporate a variety of elements such as rewards, visions, and worker participation. However, most perspectives still view leadership as something that is assigned to a designated person who then exercises influence downward toward subordinate followers. In many ways the persistent top-down command and control theme that supports established leadership thought and practice prevents organizations from fully tapping into their human resources, in turn limiting their flexibility to meet the challenges of increasingly dynamic, complex, and competitive environments. Shared Entrepreneurship replaces the top-down approaches of the past with a new framework that draws strengths and innovation from collaboration and sharing. This book is divided into two main sections. The first section consists of six chapters which provide an in-depth overview and discussion of shared entrepreneurship. The second section consists of eight original case studies commissioned by the authors, featuring such companies as Herman Miller, Inc., SRC Holdings, and W.L. Gore & Associates.

Employee participation programs have many faces, many definitions, many forms--and they change all the time. For some people they are meant to solve every problem in the workplace. For others they are ways to reduce resistance to management and its efforts to bring about organizational change. Still others see them as totally redundant and a hindrance to efficency and the implementation of good management practices. To make sense of it all, Bar-Haim integrates--historically, thematically, analytically--the wide but often incoherent knowledge we have about these programs, and in doing so portrays them in a clear, useful, multidimensional manner. The result is a work of scholarship and practical guidance that students, scholars, researchers, and executives will find important, an action-oriented source of vital information.

Bar-Haim shows that participation programs in work organizations have always attempted to solve three basic human problems, problems stemming from industrial democracy and equality, work alienation, and occupational and managerial effectiveness. To do this he uses a rare multidimensional technique. He describes and analyzes the processes and behavior of participation, participants, and organizational forms using a a variety of conceptual and theoretical frames drawn from the social and management sciences. He enhances our understanding of participation programs on micro and macro levels, and then provides practical guidelines from the real-world experience of other scholars and executives. Among the several ironies he discovers are that the roles of enthusiasts, opponents, and skeptics changed during the course of a jubilee of these programs. By integrating a large body of research and suggesting a formal model to evaluate existing employee programs and projected ones, his book attempts to ease the enigmatic ambivalence we have toward worker participation in general. In fact, he shows that by better understanding the dynamics of participation programs, it is possible for those who desire such programs to create, construct, and maintain better ones.

This book, written by the leading experts in the field, offers a comprehensive look at the factors behind the remarkable growth in employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in public companies over the past few years-plans which now own nearly half of all the assets owned by ESOPs. The contributors discuss the legal and financial structure, actual uses, and practical implications of ESOPs in publicly held companies, demonstrating how ESOPs can be an effective means of both improving corporate performance and discouraging hostile takeovers. Particular attention is given to the actual impact of ESOPs on companies, shareholders, employees, and taxpayers. Throughout, the discussion is enhanced by the use of detailed case studies of major public-company ESOPs.

Following a general discussion of the structure and uses of ESOPs, the contributors focus specifically on the implementation of ESOPs in public companies. Detailed coverage of the financial structure of ESOPs includes information about the public market for ESOP notes, the role of convertible preferred stock in public-company leveraged ESOP transactions, combining ESOPs and 401(k) plans, and ESOPs and corporate control. Subsequent chapters explore such issues as the use of ESOPs as a takeover defense, valuation in public companies, divesting a subsidiary through an ESOP, managing an employee ownership company, and the impact of the 1989 Budget Reconciliation Act on public-company ESOPs. The final chapter assesses the future of employee ownership in publicly traded companies. Numerous tables and figures amplify points made in the text. Employee benefits consultants, commercial loan officers, and human resources executives will find this book an indispensable resource.

With the financial crisis and Great Recession, some economists have begun to question the orthodox approach to production and capital/labor relations over the last two to three decades. This orthodoxy has been thrown into question due to concerns of poor corporate decision-making, corporate capture of regulators, perceived rewards for failure, and uneven productivity growth. But a new spirit of introspection and doubt about orthodox approaches has created some impetus leading to greater interest in themes, such as worker ownership, sharing rewards, co-operatives, and employee involvement practices which feature heavily in the "Advances" series. This "new spirit" is apparent for all to see in the 12 contributions to this volume of "Advances" which cover co-operatives; effects of worker participation on firm performance; the diffusion of high involvement management practices; and outcomes for workers (i.e., job satisfaction and wages).

More than a guide to establishing a proposal system, this volume presents methods for teaching know-how. It gives each reader the principles for thinking creatively about improving his or her own work.

This highly practical book is filled with easily understood explanations and examples of how to teach your employees to pursue excellence through kaizen teian.

Before you can institute a successful kaizen teian program, you must have a firm understanding of its underlying principles and rules. This book concentrates on making those principles clear and focuses on the importance of consistently implementing proposals. Actual examples of implemented proposals from five leading Japanese companies illustrate the principles described, and numerous figures and case studies add clarity throughout. If you are ready to tap into the full potential of your work force, this book will help you to train them to seek out new and ever better ways to do their work.