This paper considers the conflict between cooperatives and technology. Data and examples are given from various empirical studies carried out in Spain and show that there is no general support for the optimistic hypothesis that cooperatives need to humanise opportunities for technological...

Social innovation that has been characterized as internal or external intervention action –arising from people in need or from those who want to help–, social development –improving the welfare or social cohesion– that, through an original change in the provision of a service or...

In this study we endeavour to expose the falseness of a certain sense of underlying inferiority in the company model advocated by the social economy. We will do so by describing and analysing certain “recent” management trends whose origins run from the end of the Second World War to the...

The effects of worker participation have been evaluated and recognised as positive from all points of view. This evidence is confirmed, under certain conditions, by the motivational, industrial and business relations paradigms. The problem faced today does not lie in its necessity – shared...

The difficulty in running a self-managed firm has been one of the arguments used in economics literature to prove the non-viability of the model. People who are sufficiently talented and willing both to manage worker-owners and to assume processes of collective decision-making are a scant...

The objective of this paper is explore the roots of the co-operative movement in the food oil sector from a historical perspective through a bibliographical review of the diverse studies carried out at the regional and provincial levels in Spain. It explores the causes of co-operatives’...

This paper aims to explain the evolution of the worker co-operatives phenomenon in Spain, going beyond the mere juxtaposition of the dispersed data in the bibliographic sources available. However, as well as this task, we have tried to establish causal relations at the economic, political and...

There are at least two types of companies: conventional capitalist companies or Profit Maximizing Firms (PMFs) and, on the other hand, companies managed by their workforce or Labour-Managed Firms (LMFs). The entrepreneurial structures in Spain which include this second type are worker...

The regeneration of the current economic system demands a new kind of innovation whose patterns and participants differ from the purely technological paradigm. Thus has social innovation arisen from different political and academic spheres as a phenomenon connected in a myriad of ways to the...