Category Archives: Research

One of the benefits of worker-owned businesses is that they tend to pay people more equally; the lowest wages and the highest wages in a typical worker-owned business are nearer to each other than the lowest and highest wages in … Continue reading →

When we think of democracy, we usually think of either consensus and direct democracy on the one hand, or elections and representative democracy on the other, but in a recent article in the Journal of Management Inquiry, Simon Pek argues … Continue reading →

Why are coops so rare? If worker-owned businesses are so much better than traditional businesses, why aren’t they more common? Worker-owners face a number of external barriers that make it harder to start and run a cooperative business, a lack … Continue reading →

Imanol Basterretxea, Iñaki Heras-Saizarbitoria and Aitziber Lertxundi from the University of the Basque Country recently published an important paper about the failure of Fagor Electrodomésticos, the flagship cooperative in the Mondragon Corporation that went bankrupt in 2013, and last March, … Continue reading →

How US cities are beginning to take an active role in promoting worker-ownership. There are certain places in the world, like the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain for instance, or the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, where worker-ownership is much more … Continue reading →

When Fagor Electrodomésticos, the flagship cooperative in the Mondragon Corporation, went bankrupt in 2013, cooperative economists began studying the failure hoping to learn more about why it went bankrupt, and also perhaps, to learn how other cooperatives might avoid the … Continue reading →

Probably one of the most important research articles on worker ownership was published by Tal Simons and Paul Ingram: “Organization and Ideology: Kibbutzim and Hired Labor, 1951-1965”. It is both an important practical article and a key theoretical article. In … Continue reading →

Yesterday I published a post about the new book, Jackson Rising, edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya, and while I was researching Nangwaya to see if I could find his homepage, I stumbled across a short article he wrote about “Labor … Continue reading →

The Democracy at Work Institute in Oakland California conducts an annual census of all the worker cooperatives in the United States, and they have just released their analysis of their data from 2015. This is a relatively new research project. … Continue reading →

The 2008 global financial crisis was the greatest economic shock to the world economy since the great depression. The crisis not only tested the foundations of the capitalist economic system; it also presented a severe test for the cooperative economic … Continue reading →