The Cooperative Economy

What a wonderful reception of today's special session on the Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management at hashtag in beautiful hashtag ! Together with Thibault Mirabel, Lucio Biggiero, Oier Imaz and Marina Albanese, I introduced the work of 55 authors and 36 chapters to a room full of economists dealing with hashtag and hashtag . As Gabriel Burdin said during his presentation, presenting your work at IAFEP "is a bit like presenting work to your family before going out into the world".

It was an honor to host Dario Salvetti and Marco Lomuscio, representing the striking GKN Automotive workers of , at our home in . They were here for the Eurobike show, where they presented their new business model: Collettivo Fabbrica, whose aim is to employ the former factory workers to produce and .

I took these pictures at an event hosted by IG Metall at the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund's youth organization, DGB Jugend Frankfurt.

Es war sehr schön, sich heute in einem großen Kreis von Bekanntschaften der letzten 4 Jahre zu treffen und auch einen neuen Kreis engagierter Menschen kennenzulernen, um Frank Schulz-Nieswandt von seiner Professur an der Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universität zu Köln zu verabschieden! Eine sehr schöne Angelegenheiten und auch kann ich mich an Franks skeptischen Äußerungen hinsichtlich der wandelnden gesellschaftlichen Rolle der Universität völlig anschließen. "Zu viele Postdocs werden angestellt, die nur mit Forschung zu tun haben und immer nur im Flugzeug nach Berkeley sitzen" und "zu viele 6 Seitige Paper werden geschrieben". Das Problem der Veröberflächlichung und Verinstrumentalisierung der Wissenschaft im Dienste einer rationalen Ökonomisierung ist eine ernstzunehmendes und auch risikobehaftete Entwicklung.

Der Abschied von Frank ist ein echter Verlust an der "University of Cologne" als Stimme gegen diesen Trend und Noch-Verbindung zu der humboldtschen Universität.

The Handbook has an official release date: November 18! Can already be pre-ordered October 28!

The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management Cooperatives have spread across virtually all continents. Today, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) recognizes over 3 million cooperatives with 1 billion cooperative members or about 12% of the human population, and serving many more members of the public, collectively owning trillions in....

I have just received news from Steve Kellerman that the intellectual giant Noam Chomsky is dying. Message as follows, I can only concur with it 100%:

Noam Chomsky Fan Club Luc Castelein David Ellerman Ciano Mac Doug Henwood Gil Skillman Kaitlin Ulyanov

The cooperative economy on the rise in Amsterdam:

‘What if we built our own?’: young Amsterdammers fight housing crisis with cooperative build Group of university students awarded plot after city hall passes plan for 15 to 20 cooperative projects

For all friends and colleagues: the official call for abstracts for the Companion to the Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics & Management is out!

Call for Abstracts: Global Cooperative Economics (& Movements) The editors of the forthcoming Global Cooperative Economics (and Movements) cordially invite interested scholars to contribute to this important, timely, and transdisciplinary reference work. The v…

Just in time for Labor Day (May 1): Routledge's editorial board has just approved our volume 'Global Cooperative Economics (and Movements)' in its Routledge Companions in Business and Economics series. This volume, which will be the sister volume to the Handbook of Coop Economics and Management, will primarily consist of a global repository of case studies that delve into the more politicized aspects of cooperatives, exploring how they intersect with global movements, social justice, policymaking, and grassroots activism and aims to provide further insights to real struggles tackled by this enterprise form.

In this domain, it hopes to contribute to deepening understanding of both how the cooperative ethos is practiced in different types, including cooperative banks, agricultural, consumer, worker, housing and platform cooperatives, etc., as well as contrasting and comparing experiences in the Global North and South and connecting cooperation and cooperatives with controversial topics such as migration and prison reform and/or abolition.

A new will go out shortly and we look forward to working together with various actors within the cooperative movement, in federations and in the cooperative research community to bring this important project to fruition.

Congratulations to the editorial team, including myself, Kemi Ogunyemi, Asia C. Guerreschi and Maciej Szulc, for getting us this far and thanks for the Handbook editorial team, which beyond Kemi and myself includes Lucio Biggieroo and Jamin Hubner, in preparing the ground. Special shout-out on both projects to Sara Vicari!

Tiny little Ales ("Abas" in the Sard language), a small town of 1500 souls, nestled into the foothills of Monte Arce, is at the same time home to Sardinia's oldest archive and Italy's smallest diocese. In addition to its museum of toys, the village, which has been continuously inhabited for ca. 6,000 years, has the illustrious honor of being the birthplace of Antonio Gramsci. After parking at the eponymously named "Piazza Antonio Gramsci", walking around, picking up a few stray clementines, asking the very kind locals a few times "scusate, sapete dove e la casa natale di Gramsci?" and being pointed in the right direction, we met Enriquo, who had the keys to the Casa Natale and was so kind to let us in. Enriquo was wearing a "Rock x Gramsci" Tshirt, an event to bring together political activists, young locals and admirers of Gramsci to practice what he preached: culture!

A sidenote: two days prior, the Casa had hosted an event honoring 100 years since the birth of Franco Basaglia: "Basaglia e Gramsci", featuring debates, discussions and speeches connecting the two savants...

After signing the guestbook and viewing the Gramsci-themed art (much of it on incarceration and prison abolition), we made our way onward to the Giara, a steep plateau formed between 2-5 million years ago through volcanic activity, which today hosts a native breed of miniature horse.

To quote the Beatles, "It's been a long, long, long time"…

Thanks to Lucio Biggiero, Jamin Hübner, Kemi Ogunyemi, Sara Vicari David Ellerman Sonja Novkovic Graeme Nuttall OBE Jens Martignoni Niels Mygind Karen Miner Oier Imaz Christian Felber Cynthia Srnec Ludger Voigt Louis Cousin Francesca Martinelli, PhD Morshed Mannan Simon Pek, PhD Coline Serres Anu Puusa Andreas Exner T. O. Molefe Linda Bennison Andres Felipe Camargo Benavides Vangelis Papadimitropoulos Marina Albanese Molly Scott Cato and many others for their collaboration, work, support and encouragement!

Just sent a 721 page manuscript to Routledge (that's without the images). Now packing this huge stack of chapters on inter-firm networks and clusters in Belgium, along with my green tea and a few other artefacts and heading to the Mediterranean: Florence, Siena, Livorno, Sardegna: stiamo arrivando!

Pericles' Funeral Oration is often considered a founding text of democratic theory or theory of democracy. In addition to being one of the most quoted speeches in world history (think Lincoln's Gettysburg Address), it also contains some vital nuggets for us all. When Pericles calls Athens "the school of Hellas, where even our enemies can listen in on our debates", he is emphasizing one of the most central elements of a democratic culture: openness to differences of opinion.

I can only admonish us all, even myself, to hear these words from many millennia ago and not forget or lose the ability to tolerate and speak respectfully with people who may not share our own views! Otherwise, we land in what Jimi Hendrix called "A Room Full of Mirrors"...

A great friend of the cooperative economy Frans de Waal spent most of his career studying primates, including bonobos and gorillas, studying issues like diplomacy and conflict resolution among such societies. His work was path-breaking and books like "Our Inner Ape" are fascinating challenges to traditional visions of ethics and morality.

Sad news: Frans de Waal is gone Frans de Waal has died. Among his smaller accomplishments was winning an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012, with colleague Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees ind…

First draft of the Handbook introduction. Check!

Dismayed to hear about the passing of Carlo Borzaga, founder of Euricse and one of the pioneers of cooperative economics in recent memory. His strong advocacy for taking seriously the study of and the in Italy and beyond earned him the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy last year. Read about his passing on the Euricse website: https://euricse.eu/en/ciao-carlo-ci-mancherai/

George Galloway won a by-election in Rochdale. This is symbolic in many ways!

‘This Is for Gaza’: George Galloway, Leftist Firebrand, Wins U.K. Seat As the Mideast conflict reverberates through British politics, the populist politician with a history of inflammatory statements about Israel won a special election in northern England.

It's almost finished! More than a year after setting out on this project, we are about a month from sending the manuscript to the publisher. While there is still some work to be done in that month, "we've been on the mountaintop" and the majority of the heavy lifting is behind us at this point. Having a bird's eye view at the emerging product, I can with confidence say that this book will be a strong entry to putting on the map as a research agenda from an econ and management perspective. We hope to help connect researchers, cooperative businesses and policymakers in fruitful dialogue.

It's too early to thank people for their time, patience and effort, but certainly a shout-out to Jamin Hübner, Lucio Biggiero and Kemi Ogunyemi, fellow editors of the volume. I'm very proud of what we've achieved together with the amazing authors we've gathered together and am very curious what the general public will think once it hits the shelves later this year!

is an expression heard often today during political campaigns.

Well, Otto von Gierke would have turned 183 this year. This austere Prussian junker dedicated his long career to studying the (particularly European) history of law, writing, among others, four huge volumes tracing lineages from pre-Roman to modern German law. The idea of "people before profit" could certainly be attributed to Gierke, who claimed "there is no right without responsibility." He was a critic of the German civic law code emerging in the 1870s, which he felt was too individualistic and risked losing any collective embedding of what he called "social law". In 1911, ten years before he died, he was enobled, receiving the hereditary title "von" in recognition of his life's work.

A report from the BBC on the relevance of E.P. Thompson's work:

The Essay - The Enormous Condescension of Posterity - Breaking Class - BBC Sounds Writer Natasha Carthew on the inspiration of EP Thompson's classic work of social history.

One of the most important thinkers on the issue of cooperative economy would be celebrating his 100th birthday this week: EP Thompson, who in his 1971 article on the crowd in 18th century England coined the expression "the moral economy":

What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class | Kenan Malik A century after his birth, EP Thompson’s empathy with those facing scorn and condescension is more relevant than ever

Greetings from Trieste, Italy!

As a stickler for dramatic effect, I've just submitted an article to the Journal of Organizational and Entrepreneurial Diversity based on five years of research, studying the modern history of Italy, especially focused on the emergence and evolution of social and community cooperatives, a fascinating legal form that encompasses multiple stakeholders into democratic organizations providing public services. Much of the impetus for this evolution happened right here in Trieste, in psychiatric institutions like the one I visited today, where a "democratic psychiatry" merged with the long-standing cooperative model to create something entirely new.

Now, to enjoy some local wines from Friuli and tomorrow, la Serenissima: Venezia!

Many thanks to World Commerce and Contracting for inviting me to participate in a lovely keynote panel @ their European Roadshow in Kronberg on "radical collaboration across stakeholders to achieve sustainability goals". My main takeaway point was that we need to radically rethink organizations in the face of the dual challenges of sustainability and digitalization, that events like the recent ouster and corporate reinstatement of OpenAI's Sam Altman reveal that only an "eye level" approach of firm governance, cooperating across stakeholder classes, including workers and society, both within and between firms, can mitigate the tremendous risks occurring as the world -- and our economy -- change in ways prior generations could not have imagined.

See this recent discussion between Jerome Nikolai Warren and ProSocial World on cooperatives and cooperation.

A Conversation About Cooperatives with Jerome Warren Abstract:Cooperative social organizations have existed throughout history in addition to current efforts in business and management. Jerome Warren is both a ...

Still time to register! Happening in little more than half an hour!

A Conversation About Cooperatives with Jerome Warren A discussion of Jerome's work on Italy's tradition of self-organized services and exploration collaborative potential among current practitioners

The beautiful people: the cooperative economy cannot flourish and grow without a community of researchers supporting it and studying it. International Cooperative Alliance Cooperative Research Conference at KU Leuven. July 11-13, 2023.

Congratulations Louis Cousin and Anu Puusa!

Certainly, occupational hazards occur in any job setting. However, it seems quite intuitive that they are less likely in an economy that works for everyone, in a cooperative economy.

Texas airport worker dies after being sucked into Delta jet engine Identity of worker killed on Friday evening at San Antonio international airport has not been publicly released

Enea is a Spanish worker cooperative, part of Mondragon, making designer furniture. Never think economic democracy can't be sexy!