With the world of business often criticised for contributing to social and environmental damage, addressing sustainability has become necessary for virtually all business models, including co-operatives. This article investigates ways in which worker co-operatives can contribute to a more sustainable world, using the conceptual lens of Doughnut Economics (DE). It places enterprises, as a supporting pillar of our economies, at the intersection between meeting social needs and operating within planetary boundaries. A descriptive multiple case study of six worker co-operatives in the UK indicates that these enterprises contribute to sustainability primarily by embodying a mission of fulfilling the needs of workers and their communities, rather than just aiming for financial gains. Worker co-operatives are enterprises with highly generative design traits, distributive of the wealth they generate, and to some degree regenerative by design. Their strengths lie in learning capacity and dis...

Abstract The article examines transformative alternatives that may offer pathways toa more participative, sustainable and equitable social order. It focuses on oneform of alternative, worker-owned co-operatives, and argues this existing form of democratic and economic relations has already proven capacity to generate more equitable socio-economic outcomes and residual social capital. The worker-owned model islocated within an ideological framework that focuses on the inherent democratising principles of their praxis that can in the right circumstances underpin firm strategic foundations for radical social change. It examines the development of worker-owned co-ops in Ireland north and south and the obstacles that need to be overcome to make these a more feasible and common form of economic ownership. Reflecting on the current debate in Ireland it argues such co-ops cannot work effectively without a secure legal framework governing their status and softer supports including entrepreneurship development, leadership training, market research, accessing loan finance and grant aid, inter-cooperative networking and federation building. The article poses workers’ co-operatives as sites of political struggle and consciousness, expressed in co-operatives’ core values including sovereignty of labour, the subordinate nature of capital, democracy, inter-cooperation and sustainability, and in tangible democratic experiences and transformative praxis. Key words: workers’ co-operatives, economic ownership, transformation, legal framework, participation

While on the fringe of conventional managerial thought, worker participation and workplace democracy are at the very core of the co-operative business. Worker co- operative firm’s essential features, including common ownership and equal voting rights, place them firmly as special cases of participatory organizations, with a strong presence of values of equity, reciprocity, and liberty (Zamagni & Zamagni, 2010). Due to this uniqueness of co-operative entrepreneurship it is crucial to use an appropriate framework to evaluate co-operative performance. The literature assesses this type of organization by the same efficiency standards as the investor-owned enterprise, creating an ‘identity crisis’ for co-operatives with dual character- associational on the one hand, and a market-driven business on the other. The chapter provides both students and co-operative managers with methods and tools to initiate organizational change by first assessing performance of worker co-operatives as one of the ways to find the spots that weaken their social functions. It contributes to the discourse on the impact of employee participation in organizations by drawing on the theoretical and practical aspects of diagnosing and developing the “co-operative difference.” As the traditional approach to the theory of participation has been unable to capture the level of participation in co-operative firms, the chapter makes a case for the application of the Total participation (TP) framework (Stocki et al., 2008; Stocki, Assessing participation Page 3 2008; Prokopowicz et al., 2008) as an underlying concept in measuring co-operatives’ organizational performance. From the perspective of performance measurement, total participation framework offers elements that constitute a normative benchmark, or an “ideal” co-operative firm. The chapter describes the CoopIndex - a tool developed by the authors within the worker co-operative sector – used to diagnose key areas of co- operative performance linked to co-operative principles and values.

Co-operatives are social and economic enterprises that owned and managed democratically by their members for their own benefit and their communities. Irrespective of the type enterprise, the Co-operative business model operates on the same values and principles that confer to their members the triple benefits of ownership, control and utility. Co-operatives seek to build good society guided by mutual cooperation, not competition; motivated by need to build moral character, not profits; creating human dignity, not wealth. The role of Co-operatives is to cater for the social and economic needs of society that the state, the private sector, big capitalist enterprises and small family businesses may not be able to satisfy. To be successful, Co-operatives must combine the desirable approaches of other enterprises such as the service spirit of the state, the efficiency of the capitalist enterprises, the entrepreneurial culture and independence of the private sector, and the proximity and ...

This study examined the causal link between the job ownership structure and increased commitment and motivation in worker co-operatives. The separation of job ownership from management and the effective alignment of the interests of job managers and the owners have generated a lot of discussion in the past. Proponents of the agency theory have, on the one hand, recommend actions that maximize shareholders value. On the other hand, the adoption of sweeping statements of purpose by many business organizations, have led to the recommendation of the stakeholder and the stewardship theories as being the appropriate guides to corporate actions. However, given the complexities of modern business organizations where the expectations of the workers and job owners are increasingly getting blurred, reliance on these theories does not provide a satisfactory solution. Survey questionnaires were the main instrument for primary data collection in this study. Semi-structured follow-up interviews were also conducted to supplement the method. The research design included three phases of data collection and analysis. Phase one was a qualitative method of informal, semi-structured interviews while phase two was a quantitative survey, the findings of which were used to construct further semi-structured follow-up interviews with worker co-operative stakeholders. The study concluded that the job ownership structure adopted by worker co-operatives has resulted into increased commitment and motivation which has in turn lead to increased productivity and improved performance. JEL: E24, J24, O15