An Evaluative Framework for Mutual and Employee-Owned Businesses

Abstract

Mutual and Employee-owned businesses (MEOBs) continue to experience a revival in the UK, be it through the growth of building societies and financial mutuals, or the success of employee-owned businesses (see Co-operatives UK 2013a;EOA 2013). In addition, government has promoted MEOBs by transferring public services into new corporate forms, citing reports of resilience and long-term success of MEOBs.Yet despite these developments, there appears to be some ambiguity as to how to evaluate the performance of MEOBs. The lack of a coherent framework that takes the values, principles and structures into account when assessing outputs and outcomes results in a narrow understanding of MEOB performance, often focused on quantitative measures irrespective of the values and principles held by these types of organisations, and indeed their purpose.In an effort to advance such work, this paper seeks to outline a framework to evaluate mutual and employee-owned businesses taking account of a variety of dimensions that affect how MEOBs do business, and the outcomes they produce, to broaden the idea of performance by joining up values and principles that are at the centre of the mutual model with the outputs and outcomes that are being created.

Ageing and the social economy

“…Maas and Grieco (2017, p. 122) Ageing and the social economy that evaluations of social enterprises, for example, "seem to show that the warm glow of aiming for social value is stronger than the need for validation of their expectations" and call for more rigorous multi-method approaches that reflect of the limits as well as benefits of, social action. Similarly, Tischer et al (2016) argue that social enterprise evaluations, in particular, have tended to focus on a shareholder rather than stakeholder outcomes and prioritise economic and financial metrics over the impacts on client groups or participatory processes. Here, Mauksch et al (2017) call for a stronger ethnographic content within mixed methods evaluations, especially to validate the multiple effects of interventions on people in the most marginal social and economic conditions.…”

Innovation and societal transformation – what changes when the ‘social’ comes in?

“…However, social innovation is not a new phenomenon. Historical examples comprise social housing and public freshwater supply (Schimpf and Ziegler 2020), or mutual and co-operative movements (Tischer et al 2016). Also, explicit references to social innovation in the social sciences date at least back to the late 1980s (Zapf 1989).…”

Employee-ownership: Exploring the Potentials of Practicing a Democratic Ideal

“…Thus, novel forms of organizational structures are emerging in western countries, herein a revival of democratic organizing of work (Tischer et al, 2016). Both the more well-known forms of democratic organizing such as worker cooperatives (Wilson & McLean, 2012) and fully or partly employee-owned companies (Blasi, Freeman & Kruse, 2013), but also new forms that are not necessarily cooperatives as legal units, but rather democratic in their functioning and principles are now increasingly established (Battistelli, 2019).…”

“…Democracy as megatrend therefore seems to encompass both the development towards more human forms of governance and new forms of businesses (Dufays et al, 2020). However, it is acknowledged that there is in general a lack of qualitative studies (Brown et al, 2019;Bryer, 2019), to widen the understand of the positive facets of employee-ownership, and to obtain empirical insights on inherent tensions and dilemmas of such (Dufays et al, 2020;Tischer et al, 2016). The article addresses this call through the following research question: How is democratic organizing experienced and constituted among employee-owners, and what transformative potential is democratic organizing and employee-ownership perceived to hold?…”