Angesichts der erheblichen Transformationsanstrengungen, die die BaltischenRepubliken in den letzten Jahren zu bewältigen hatten, haben sich erheblicheVeränderungen auch auf dem Gebiet des Genossenschaftswesens ergeben.Wie in kaum einer anderen Region in Europa ist die Entwicklung der...

Over the last decades of the XX century, many once outstanding consumer co-operative movements disappeared without trace, beginning with Holland (1972) and Belgium, affecting more than half the French movement in 1985/86, and even including giants such as the German Coop AG in 1989/90. The...

Economic literature first turned its attention to the co-operative movement in the period of the flowering of classical political economics. From then on and to the present day, co-operatives have aroused the interest of the different currents of economic thought. In this article we review the...

This report explores the spatial dimension of productivity in the co-operatives of Italy, a country where they make up a relatively large share of total national employment. Co-operatives play a countercyclical role in job creation during crises. In a post-pandemic world, they could make a major...

The whole social and economic life is based on some form of association. People live in societies, so the idea association appeared in the most natural way, at first in an unconscious form, moving later towards the conscious and organized association. Seeing that through the association they...

The purpose of this paper is to go back to the first principles of democracy and private property, and to show that they are violated by the conventional firms based on the employment relations and are satisfied by the legal form of a worker cooperative. The conventional bundle of rights in a...

Economists believe that a problem of team production results from the desirability of production in (sometimes large) groups, the difficulty of rewarding individual group members based on their (difficult or impossible to measure) individual contributions, and the presumed interest of each...

Worker cooperatives—firms owned and governed by their workers—have experimented with organizational structure in aid of greater equality. Gender theorists and cooperativists have argued that bureaucracy produces inequality, but bureaucracy has also demonstrably reduced organizational...

Produktivgenossenschaften stehen seit vielen Jahren, genauer gesagt sogarschon seit Jahrhunderten, im Mittelpunkt einer mal mehr, mal weniger hitzigenDiskussion. Dies liegt nicht zuletzt an dem Umstand, dass sie einerseitsauf Grund der ihnen immanenten demokratischen und egalitären Elemente...

This article examines the structure of governance in co-operative business groups in the framework of the growing process of globalisation. Starting with a brief introduction to globalisation and the theories of co-operative degeneration, a specific case is analysed referring to Mondragón...