Cooperative enterprise at scale: comparative capitalisms and the political economy of ownership

Abstract

Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives’ variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieties of Capitalism and Welfare Regimes), are a significant factor in this variation. Cooperatives scale in a manner that complements arrangements in coordinated market economies, while exhibiting institutional incongruencies with those of liberal market economies and residual welfare states. Public policies which have variously enhanced or inhibited cooperatives’ ability to coordinate to scale are compared across four case countries (United States, France, Finland and New Zealand). Policy differences are shown to reflect the joint effect of state-mediated institutional arrangements alongside other control variables. They reveal how states privilege some ownership forms over others, suggesting a distinct political economy of ownership.

Multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems? Worker cooperative development in Toronto and Montréal

“…To our knowledge, there has been no peer-reviewed study testing how well or if the proposed WC EE elements (Table 1) explain the comparative quality or strength of WC development. Existing research has examined how alternatives, including cooperatives, struggle in liberal market economies (LMEs), which have been shown to prioritize the network coordination mechanisms of IOFs over alternatives (Mair and Rathert, 2019;Spicer, 2021), but this work has been crossnational in focus. Meanwhile, regional studies on cooperative enterprises not only elide over the question of how entrepreneurial networks and resources are relationally constructed but they also largely focus on "success cases" of high-activity cities and regions (DeFilippis, 2004;Spicer, 2020;Sutton, 2019) like Montréal (Bouchard, 2014;Levesque, 1990;Tanner, 2013).…”

Another organization is possible: New directions in research on alternative enterprise

“…Sutton (2019), for example, identified three types of worker cooperative-supportive approaches of US local governments, and identifies the range of policy actions associated with each. At the national scale, Spicer (2021) examined the role of policy and institutional arrangements in shaping alternatives, finding that the liberal variety of capitalism may be hostile to forms such as cooperative enterprises, giving rise to national policies that variably undermine or support their greater development, primarily by undermining their preferred inter-firm coordination strategy. This is not to say that liberal contexts are of a uniformly hostile character: it is also well established that neoliberal governments have "offloaded" welfare services to the third sector, including cooperatives and other alternatives, with implications for how organizations manage the tension between welfare and efficiency (Woolford & Curran, 2013).…”

“…Spicer and Zhong (2022), meanwhile, contrast worker cooperative entrepreneurial ecosystems in Toronto and Montréal, showing how the comparative failure of worker cooperatives in the former reflects not only a weak set of internal ecosystem elements, but also reflects poor connections to the broader capitalist and social economy ecosystems in that city‐region. Beyond the primarily case‐based research reviewed above, other emerging research, which engages at both the macro and meso scales simultaneously, is also beginning to address this question, arguing that alternative forms of organizing the economy may be incongruous with certain macro‐level field and institutional arrangements (Mair & Rathert, 2020, 2021; Spicer, 2021), a point further discussed below.…”

“…Sutton (2019), for example, identified three types of worker cooperative‐supportive approaches of US local governments, and identifies the range of policy actions associated with each. At the national scale, Spicer (2021) examined the role of policy and institutional arrangements in shaping alternatives, finding that the liberal variety of capitalism may be hostile to forms such as cooperative enterprises, giving rise to national policies that variably undermine or support their greater development, primarily by undermining their preferred inter‐firm coordination strategy.…”

“…Beyond institutional arrangements and policy, however, other macro‐level factors have been identified as germane to understanding the prevalence and success of alternatives, specifically with respect to cooperatives. These include macro national and regional factors such as industry composition, social heterogeneity difference, and physical remoteness, which all affect the decision‐making costs and comparative cost structure of alternatives such as cooperatives (vs. investor‐owned firms), and condition the solidarity‐based mechanisms of participation in them (Spicer, 2021). Whether or not these dynamics hold for all forms of alternatives beyond the cooperative, however, is empirically unclear.…”