The purpose of this paper is to delve into three side-arguments or themes about democratic enterprises (as opposed to considering first principles). Approach: 1) The first theme is the question of capital structure where labor-managed firms are often pictured as having "horizon problem." Yet...

We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....

The Oxford Handbook of Mutuals and Co-Owned Business investigates all types of 'member owned' organizations, whether consumer co-operatives, agricultural and producer co-operatives, worker co-operatives, mutual building societies, friendly societies, credit unions, solidarity organizations,...

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...

This paper describes the intersection of class, gender and race in the leadership of cooperatives in North America. Movement of labour across North American borders changes the membership of cooperatives as well as the leadership and formation of cooperatives. The socio-economic shifts that...

This paper relates firm-level processes and size distributions of firms at the industry level. An analytically tractable model explores how firm growth, exit, and spinoff activity in combination with systematically appearing growth crises in organizational development translate into specific...

This article examines the case of sustainable coffee as faced by Sara Lee’s International Coffee and Tea Division (SL), asking which strategic direction the company should take considering its regulatory, competitive and societal contexts. More than a decade after sustainable coffee became a...