Co-operatives are found in all industry sectors and almost all countries around the world. However, despite their significant economic and social contributions, the academic literature has largely ignored these important businesses. This book is a detailed examination of the co-operative enterprise business model and the factors that help to enhance its sustainability and resilience, as well as those forces that lead to its destruction. The authors synthesize theories of business model design and strategic and marketing management to examine the forces that sustain and enhance co-operative enterprise. Organised into six themes and focussed on five key research questions, the chapters explore case studies from around the world and across a wide range of industries and aim to stimulate debate. This comprehensive work expands upon existing research whilst introducing new concepts, and will appeal to both academics and practitioners. It will also interest managers of co-operative enterprises and those who seek to better understand this unique type of business.

Co-operatives are found in all industry sectors and almost all countries around the world. However, despite their significant economic and social contributions, the academic literature has largely ignored these important businesses. This book is a detailed examination of the co-operative enterprise business model and the factors that help to enhance its sustainability and resilience, as well as those forces that lead to its destruction. The authors synthesize theories of business model design and strategic and marketing management to examine the forces that sustain and enhance co-operative enterprise. Organised into six themes and focussed on five key research questions, the chapters explore case studies from around the world and across a wide range of industries and aim to stimulate debate. This comprehensive work expands upon existing research whilst introducing new concepts, and will appeal to both academics and practitioners. It will also interest managers of co-operative enterprises and those who seek to better understand this unique type of business.

From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. With specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tradition. Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers' control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to create a new world from the ashes of the old.

Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and edits "WorkingUSA."

Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director, and political scientist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

The inside story of Argentina's remarkable movement to create factories run democratically by workers themselves. The worker-run factories of Argentina offer an inspirational example of a struggle for social change that has achieved a real victory against corporate globalisation. Lavaca is an Argentine editorial and activist collective. The writer of the foreword, Naomi Klein, is an award-winning journalist and author of No Logo. Avi Lewis is an author and filmmaker. Klein and Lewis coproduced The Take, a film about Argentina's occupied factories.

Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Practices identifies and analyzes sustainable alternatives to capitalism by examining five diverse enterprises, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Green Bay Packers football team, and the Lusty Lady sex club.

The current book on Nework Governance contributes to the literature by offering new perspectives on network goals and performance, inter-organizational learning and trust in alliances, corporate governance issues in cooperatives, governance of cross-border retail networks, contract design and governance innovations in cooperatives and fanchising.

Co-operatives provide a different approach to organizing business through their ideals of member ownership and democratic practice. Every co-operative member has an equal vote regardless of his or her own personal capital investment. The contemporary significance of co-operatives was highlighted by the United Nations declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives. This book provides an international perspective on the development of co-operatives since the mid-nineteenth century, exploring the economic, political, and social factors that explain their varying fortunes and transformation into different forms. By looking at what co-operatives are; how they have changed; the developments as well as the persecutions of the co-operative movement; and how it is an important force in promoting development and self-sufficiency in non-industrialized areas, this book provides valuable insight not only to academics, but also to practitioners and policy makers.

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can affect business results. However, most managers lack a sense of how to use this new approach for issues other than product development and sales growth. "Solving Problems with Design Thinking" details ten real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations, including the City of Dublin and Denmark's The Good Kitchen.

Using design skills such as ethnography, visualization, storytelling, and experimentation, these managers produced innovative solutions to such problems as implementing strategy, supporting a sales force, redesigning internal processes, feeding the elderly, and engaging citizens. They elaborate on the challenges they faced and the processes and tools they used, providing a clear path to implementation based on the principles and practices laid out in Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie's "Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers."

The liberal state is dead, long live the partner state Across the world, the liberal nation state is on its knees. Rising inequality, deep political polarization, and the pervasive power of corporations are tearing apart the social contract and threatening to crush democracy. Civilizing the State traces the history and development of the liberal state and its changing role from the enabler of capitalism to protector of citizen welfare, to its hollowing out and capture by corporate and elite interests rendering it unfit to address the compounding crises of inequality, injustice, ecological collapse, and loss of legitimacy. Author John Restakis explores citizen-powered alternatives and experiments in co-operation, deep democracy, solidarity economics, and commoning from Spain, India, the global peasant movement, and the emerging stateless democracy of Rojava rising from the wreckage of the Syrian civil war. The final section views the current crisis as an opportunity to reimagine the state not as handmaid to predatory elites but as a partner state that promotes equity, economic democracy, co-operation, and human thriving, driven by deep democracy and a fully sovereign civil society. Incisive, penetrating, and inspirational, this is essential reading for all engaged citizens with a stake in co-creating a better future for all.

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.

As the world of work and jobs is more uncertain than ever because of various trends impacting it, including the rise of robotics and the gig economy, Cooperatives and the World of Work furthers the debate on the future of work, sustainable development, and the social and solidarity economy of which cooperatives are a fundamental component. Throughout the book, the authors, who are experts in their respective fields, do not limit themselves to praising the advantages of the cooperative model. Rather, they challenge the narrow understanding of cooperatives as a mere business model and raise debate on the more fundamental role that cooperatives play in responding to social changes and in changing society itself. The book is unique in tracing the historical connection between cooperatives and the world of work since the end of the First World War and the recent shifts and restructuring in enterprise and the workplace. It presents a redefinition of the very concept of work, focusing on organizational innovation. This book is published in recognition of 100 years of the International Labour Organization, and gathers together research from leading experts who were brought together at an event co-hosted by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO).

As the world of work and jobs is more uncertain than ever because of various trends impacting it, including the rise of robotics and the gig economy, Cooperatives and the World of Work furthers the debate on the future of work, sustainable development, and the social and solidarity economy of which cooperatives are a fundamental component. Throughout the book, the authors, who are experts in their respective fields, do not limit themselves to praising the advantages of the cooperative model. Rather, they challenge the narrow understanding of cooperatives as a mere business model and raise debate on the more fundamental role that cooperatives play in responding to social changes and in changing society itself. The book is unique in tracing the historical connection between cooperatives and the world of work since the end of the First World War and the recent shifts and restructuring in enterprise and the workplace. It presents a redefinition of the very concept of work, focusing on organizational innovation. This book is published in recognition of 100 years of the International Labour Organization, and gathers together research from leading experts who were brought together at an event co-hosted by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO).

This reference guide looks at ESOPs, seen primarily as a method of improving corporate results through motivating employees, but which also has a role in corporate finance as a provider of capital in a highly tax efficient manner. Multinationals wishing to spread shares internationally and quoted companies wanting to capture equity for share incentives can successfully utilize an ESOP scheme and it is therefore anticipated that implementation of such schemes will follow the pattern of the US and will become a familiar tool of corporate finance.;The legal and accounting ramifications are explored in this book. This text provides a reference source for the Chief Executive, Treasurer, and executive officers in medium to large companies in the UK but will also be of relevance to their banking, legal and tax advisors. The author is currently a member of the Centre for Economic Performance (LSE) and the Centre for Business Strategy (LBS) and is currently working on a large scale survey of employee ownership in the UK.

This volume is an examination of the origins, characteristics and performance of employee-owned firms. It focuses on firms that have converted to either partial or full employee ownership using recent institutional, fiscal and legal innovations. Based on five years of empirical research, this is a topical contribution to recent debates on the challenging nature of employment.

This 12th edition of "Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms" contains a stimulating collection of original papers spanning a wide variety of topics. Part 1 of the volume contains three papers on the subject of job design and organizational performance, covering the determinants of multiskilling from a theoretical perspective and also the empirical effect of multiskilling and teams on financial performance. Part 2 of the volume concerns compensation, worker attitudes, and productivity. Papers in this section cover the effect of rules and costs on employer-provided health insurance, majority ownership and executive compensation, worker attitudes towards different forms of employee ownership and variable pay, and an analysis of performance-related pay, unions, and productivity in Italy. Part 3 contains three studies of worker cooperatives and nonprofit organizations in Italy, Spain, and Uruguay. This volume concludes with a debate on free trade and the ecological effects of alternative socio-economic systems.

Berkshire Hathaway, the $500 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 them wrong. In a comprehensive portrait of the corporate culture that unites Berkshire's subsidiaries, Lawrence A. Cunningham unearths the traits that assure the conglomerate's continued prosperity. Riveting stories of each subsidiary's origins, triumphs, and journey to Berkshire reveal how managers generate economic value from intangibles like 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, family business members, and investors, and it is an important resource for scholars of corporate stewardship. General readers will enjoy learning how an iconoclastic businessman transformed a struggling textile company into a corporate legacy.

In previous work, Gregory K. Dow created a broad and accessible overview of worker-controlled firms. In his new book, The Labor-Managed Firm: Theoretical Foundations, Dow provides the formal models that underpinned his earlier work, while developing promising new directions for economic research. Emphasizing that capital is alienable while labor is inalienable, Dow shows how this distinction, together with market imperfections, explains the rarity of labor-managed firms. This book uses modern microeconomics, exploits up-to-date empirical research, and constructs a unified theory that accounts for many facts about the behavior, performance, and design of labor-managed firms. With a large number of entirely new chapters, comprehensive updating of earlier material, a critique of the literature, and policy recommendations, here Dow presents the capstone work of his career, encompassing more than three decades of theoretical research.

The current co-op movement in the U.S. seeks to be a structural alternative to capitalism; this book seriously questions whether the current movement can accomplish that task. Carl Ratner offers a rich and unique political analysis and critique that provides helpful insights into the practice and problems of the contemporary cooperative movement. Noting that co-operators tend to view their work as apolitical because the explicit influence of national political parties is absent, the author constructs a compelling argument that co-operators nonetheless operate unwittingly with implicit political conceptions of freedom, opportunity, human rights, social participation, decision-making, power, and governance that are shaped and limited by the capitalist economic system. Ratner demonstrates how a more radical, anti-capitalist, socialist form of cooperation and co-ops are needed to realise the fulfilling potential of cooperation and co-ops. For those wishing to understand and advance the cooperative movement, this book is essential reading.

The Italian Cooperative Sector is amongst the largest in the world comprising over 60,000 cooperatives from all sectors of the economy directly employing 1.3 million people. Cooperatives created close to 30 percent of new jobs in Italy between 2001 and 2011 demonstrating that democratic cooperative enterprises can successfully operate in a market economy combining economic success and social responsibility. These offer a viable alternative to profit maximising enterprises and an opportunity to create a more pluralist and democratic market economy. The Growth of Italian Cooperatives: Innovation, Resilience and Social Responsibility comprehensively explains how the Italian cooperative sector has managed to compete successfully in the global economy and to grow during the global financial crisis. This book will comprehensively explain how the Italian cooperative movement has managed to grow into a large successful network of cooperatives. It will examine the legislative framework and their unique business model that allows it to compete in the market as part of a network that includes central cooperative associations, financial and economic consortia, and financial companies. It will explore cooperative entrepreneurship through a discussion of the formation of cooperative groups, start-ups, worker-buyouts and the promotion of entirely new sectors such as the social services sector. Finally, The Growth of Italian Cooperatives examines how cooperatives have managed the GFC and how their behavior differs from private enterprises. It will also analyze the extent to which cooperatives compete while still uphold the key cooperative principles and fulfil their social responsibility. This book is an interdisciplinary study of cooperative development and is designed to inform members of the academic community, government, public policy makers and cooperative managers that are primarily interested in economic democracy, economics of the cooperative enterprise, cooperative networks and economic development, cooperative legislation, democratic governance, job creation programs, politics of inclusion and how wealth can be more equitably distributed.

The effects and impact of employee participation and employee ownership continue to be themes of enduring interest to social scientists from a range of disciplines. The analysis presented in this volume are representative of the best economics research being carried out in the study of labor and empirical studies. Several of the papers deal with the issue of privatization in transition economies, where a large number of newly privatized firms have effectively been transformed into employee owned enterprises. Other key themes covered in this volume are profit sharing in both East and West Europe, the issue of evolutionary transformation of cooperatives into conventional private firms, and the growing importance of the role of social cooperatives in the welfare state.

The extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation-among companies, governments, and individuals-generated by financialization. The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than with appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations. In this book, in clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization. That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees-to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy-has become a new site of social struggle. Above all, Feher articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.

The John Lewis Partnership, a major British retailing company, has been employee-owned and operated according to democratic principles since 1929. Conventional models of commercial success would predict that such an arrangement would be inefficient and that the firm would tend to underinvest. Using conventional performance criteria, the authors demonstrate that the Partnership is highly successful and that conventional methods to predict business performance are flawed. The authors feel that to understand why this firm has sustained its commercial prosperity over several decades, one must look to its distinctive emphasis on people.

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.

Developing talent is at the heart of any successful business, but in an age of changing technology and social needs, how can you best adapt to a new world and develop the talent your company needs? Harnessing Change to Develop Talent and Beat the Competition explores how organizations can formulate effective corporate level and business level strategies to achieve competitive advantage, earn above average profits, build and retain talent, and sustain financial strength. Fitting into the gaps left by existing books, expert authors James and Lori Spina explore the ideas and actions business can take to meet local needs. For executives making strategic business decisions, and for practitioners and researchers across the business industry, this exciting new guide helps people striving to obtain new levels of responsibility within an organization, reinvigorate existing processes, and implementing a new strategic management system.