The cooperative economy

Mondragon (Cooperative) Team Academy, Shanghai https://hundred.org/it/innovations/mta-world-mondragon-team-academy#66c1b3ac

The cooperative economy is an alternative path to social democracy that aims at the ecological composition of the actors in the economy rather than direct reforms by the state. While the theoretical basis of nonviolent resistance transformation to a democratic state has co-evolved with the practice over time it is at best a “partial” theory (McCarthy, 1977). The discipline traces its origins to a tradition of trial-and-error practice that “just works” and the theoretical and statistical evidence from fields of sociology, anthropology and political science have followed to explain the practice after-the-fact. In order to stand the test of critical scrutiny when attracting support towards the movement, the strategic framework should have at least as strong theory as the nonviolent resistance discipline. Such a strategy should have both theoretical foundations in sociology, human psychology and account for the empirical evidence of anthropological macroeconomic phenomenon of urbanization and sectoral transformations of the 20th century. The aim here is to construct a testable hypothesis that meets this criteria. The theoretical framework takes the perspective of the economy as an ecosystem of interacting legal entities which control resources and one of which is the malignant corporation. The outcomes for the system as a whole are determined by the relative compositions of the malignant or beneficial forms.

This article makes the case for an economy-based roadmap to the social democracy based on moving from the competitive, corporate to cooperative economy. The main hypothesis — corporate cancer is introduced and then the solution, the cooperative and mission-oriented-communities. How to get there? A brief framework for how to go from the current competitive to the cooperative economy, with a critique of caveat criticisms and open challenges. The article ends with an invitation for the first steps on getting started.

1. The case for the cooperative economy strategy
2. The corporate cancer hypothesis
3. The cooperative
4. Mission oriented communities (MOC)
5. Competitive to cooperative economy theory of change
6. Caveats
7. Moving forward

The case for the cooperative economy strategy

The modern economy is dominated by the corporate form of firm governance (Avi-Yonah, 2005). A corporation is a legal entity entitled with rights similar to a person which is bound by a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interests of its shareholders. Early corporations had specific, often public, missions such as to build a railroad or steel mill and many were non-profit. From the 20th century onwards however, the de-facto existential purpose is to generate a financial return for its shareholders and this is enshrined into law (Avi-Yonah, 2005). Shareholders are protected by limited liability and their voting share is proportional to their ownership stake. Its behavior is like a cancerous growth in that it is a repeating cellular unit that tends towards growth, but too much of that growth in certain conditions becomes harmful to its host — the global economy. The corporation due to norms, laws and incentive dynamics has a tendency through competitive selective pressure to exchange negative externalities for financial profit between the shareholders that control the firm and the stakeholders at the interfaces of the firm.

An alternative to the corporation is the cooperative, which is owned and managed democratically on the basis of one vote per member by the users or workers. Another open cooperative-based entity is the mission-oriented-community (MOC) which are open, autonomous self-organizing communities organized around a clear purpose, decentralized in structure governed by a transparent set of rules. The social governance strategy aims to reform the composition of the economy such that control of productive resources of the economy are dominated by alternatives to the shareholder corporation. The case for the cooperative economy approach over the democratic state strategy — lower barrier to entry, multiple entry points, economies of scale and closer to root cause with a pre-distributive model.

Case for a firm-level social governance reform strategy

1. Larger resource pool, lower barrier to entry due to non-adversarial position to the state
2. Lower access barriers multiple points-of-entry
3. Economies of scale in learning effort
4. Getting closer to the root cause with pre-distributive vs post-distributive solution

Larger available resource pool by lowering the barrier to entry

By focusing on firm governance, the movement aims are not directly positioned as adversarial to the state and in the most optimistic case could be complimentary. This could be an important consideration in a political environment where either the state has broad public support or otherwise is an effective authoritarian regime of reinforcing a culture of fear. Either case could be relevant for Singapore where open opposition to the state is both institutionally restricted and culturally taboo. A lower barrier to entry widens the pool of potential resources to mobilize for the transformation effort. It is not certain however whether this model is more or less confrontational given that the multinational corporation’s central positioning in Singapore’s economic blueprint traces to the initial design of the basic government institutions and is reaffirmation in contemporary political rhetoric (Teck Wong Soon, 1993 ; Chan Chun Sing, 2020).

Lower access barriers multiple points-of-entry

Compared to the number of autonomous academic or media entities in a country or a city, there are thousands of firms of different sizes as potential opportunities to learn and refine the practice of how to reform the governance as an outside entity through trial-and-error. The diversity of distribution of sizes and types of firms creates an opportunity that if unsuccessful for one campaign, there are many alternative opportunities for repeated attempts.

Economies of scale in learning effort

There may not be much additional information to characterize the difference of the lessons learned for how to organize a firm for a scale of 50 employees compared to one of 10,000 employees. Once the tactics for how to reform a target have been piloted and proven on a small scale they may be reused and adapted at larger scale with minimal marginal additional expense of learning effort. Through repeated experience and establishing some gains on a small scale, these gains can be capitalized to consolidated such as cooperative of cooperatives and eventually compete with the dominant actors in the economy.

Getting closer to the root cause with pre-distributive vs post-distributive solution

The concept of the welfare state leaves dynamics of how firms interface with their communities at a local level largely untouched and instead intervenes after-the-fact to correct for imbalances through taxes and transfers. Reforming at the firm level is a preventative approach that applies the corrections closer to where the decisions are made. The welfare state model may be less stable if it is vulnerable to single-point-of-failure such as if at some point the public trust in the welfare state model drops below critical levels. While an ecology of pre-distributive firms may result in non-standard outcomes, it could also provide some resilience to variations in performance between firms. Ideally the two systems could interact with and reinforce one another.

Corporate cancer

The corporation is characterised by :

1. Legally enforced fiduciary principal-agent relationship of shareholders and the firm
2. Limited liability of the shareholders
3. Limited disclosure obligation
4. Voting rights proportional to the ownership stake %
5. Legal treatment and definition of rights and privileges of the firm as though it is a person
6. The firm is an entity which creates a financial return on shareholder capital by owning assets, — contacting labor and other services to providing a service to a customer market
7. Alienable ownership rights — owning a share is dependent on an existing shareholder giving up (selling) their ownership stake

The political ideology of free markets which goes by several names — “market fundamentalism” or “neoliberalism” by it’s opponents extends the model of the corporation and primacy of the rights of shareholders broadly into the domestic economy and to international trade. The ideology as expressed by the Heritage Foundation in their “Economic Freedom Index” advocates for open, tax free borders for immigration and trade, low or zero taxes on capital gains, independent central bank with low interest rate target, mature and deregulated capital and credit markets, low corporate income taxes, privatization of public services, limited government regulation of businesses, and decentralized wage negotiation (Miller, 2020). The cooperative economy strategy is based on the corporate cancer hypothesis, which asserts that the main malignant characteristics of the economy can be traced to the design of the corporate governance institutional framework and substituting an alternative would be sufficient to reform to a more equitable and sustainable economy.

Corporate cancer hypothesis

1. Most of the undesirable characteristics of the current economic system which can be improved can be attributed to the corporate governance institutional framework.
2. Switching to an economy where alternatives to the corporation are the dominant form of production of goods & services is sufficient to resolve the deficiencies of the current system

The hypothesis is based on the following points and explained in an earlier article (Hickem, 2020 the corporate cancer).

1. Managers are restricted in scope to appropriate a financial return to the shareholders
2. Firm externalizes costs to stakeholders in exchange for a profit to shareholders
3. Limited application to business models of products that are excludable — private goods, clubs
4. Hierarchical organizational structure conform top-down execution of instructions and protective defences
5. Market power relationship with stakeholder combined with diffusion of responsibility within the firm has emergent effect of adverse risks to stakeholders and undermines long term risk management decision making
6. May be benign or complimentary to human development during rapid industrialization and urbanization but counterproductive or malignant in the advanced stage of development

If there are alternative firm governance models to the corporate model which are more ideally adapted to provision of public goods, this could be a microeconomic solution alternative to the welfare state proposal.

The cooperative

One alternative to the corporation is the cooperative. The cooperative governance design features encourage cooperation within and outside the firm. While the org charts and day to day operations inside a cooperative may be indistinguishable from a corporate firm, they have a radically different structural relationship with the stakeholder interfaces. While cooperatives do use some features that look similar to corporations to manage ownership rights, the concept of a detached shareholder group is nonexistent. Instead the stakeholder interfaces are incorporated directly into the governance process through several design features. The case for the cooperative is made in a short 2016 essay competition “Rethinking growth: how cooperatives can foster common growth ” (Ettlin, 2016). The design principles of cooperative governance are (International Co-operative Alliance, 2020) :

1. Owned by set of members either the workers or those who consume the service

2. Voting share is democratic — one vote per member

3. Open access membership

4. Member economic contribution

5. Education, training, information
6. Cooperative of cooperatives
7. Concern for community

These design features deal directly with the root cause deficiencies of the corporate model and could promote conditions that are more favorable for building public trust and cooperative behavior for three reasons :

1. Bringing owners and managers into more intimate contact
2. Democratic participation builds trust, engagement
3. Stakeholder governance by design

Bringing owners and managers into more intimate contact

Information failures in corporate organizations for risk management and governance have been associated as causal factors in major disasters and corruption scandals. In particular the separation between shareholder owners and management has been identified as a particularly vulnerable weak link (Hickem, 2020 corporate cancer). The cooperative model brings the owners and managers into more intimate contact with an enhanced opportunity for information exchange through explicit commitment to transparency, member contribution, democratic one-member-one-vote decision making and implicit contact for members who are also a stakeholder group (customers, employees). Multiple stakeholder interfaces adds perspective diversity and potential enhanced quality of information and decisions.

Providing direct access to the governance process has the effect of leveling the asymmetry of managers and other stakeholder groups (employees) which is an effective means of wage compression (Ettlin, 2016). Higher employee wages is not only an extra incentive for productivity enhancement, investment in human capital but also a stimulus to the local economy. A more symmetrical balance between management and employees may also build greater engagement, trust and commitment of employees with the firm if they feel a closer social association with management.

The member contribution principle creates opportunities for more intimate types of engagement such as face to face. Repeated face to face contact has been identified as a critical mechanism for developing affective trust, which is related to care, concern and empathy in relationships in teams (Calefato, 2016). These more intimate contact experiences are more conducive to empathy, building mutual respect and between managers and stakeholders and share emotional information to supplement raw facts and statistics.

Democratic participation builds trust, engagement

The democratic principle of cooperatives builds engagement, trust, retention and commitment within the organization. Higher participatory workplace environments are associated with higher employee engagement and lower attrition (Foley Polanyi, 2006). While higher participatory team dynamics is the ultimate aim of a democratic work environment, the democratic institution alone is not sufficient to ensure participatory outcomes, and purely flat organizational structures are still a relative novelty (Coulton, 2017). The well studied case of Mondragon Cooperative in Spain is democratic only at the scale of the overall structure of the organization, but otherwise traditionally hierarchical from management down to the operational team divisions (Lutz, 1997). This macro-level democracy appears to be sufficient to achieve the desired outcomes of high employee satisfaction and wage compression (Lutz, 1997). In her summary analysis of best practices of successful common pool resource governance, Elinor Ostrom concluded that more democratic, higher participatory governance encourages higher engagement, conducive to trust, cooperation individuals involved sense they have some stake and influence on the outcomes (Ostrom, 1990)

Stakeholder governance model by design

The structure of the organization integrates the interests of stakeholders intrinsically through principles of members as owners, member contribution, contribution to the community and cooperative of cooperatives. Together the members as owners and member contribution principles ensures that those that contribute their time, resources, labor have an explicit ownership interest in management. The principle of contribution to community disambiguates the obligation of social responsibility to external interfaces and empowers anyone in the governance framework to monitor and prevent externalizing costs. The cooperative of cooperatives principle formalizes the basis of relations with other firms as a cooperative and a safeguard against asymmetric power abuse in inter-firm relations.

Mission oriented communities

A third type of governance can either be considered as a special type of open cooperative mission oriented community (MOC), or the more common term “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO). The reason for the emphasis on mission here is to distinguish those DAO which are organized around a purposeful mission. A common application for MOC are online digital communities to manage knowledge resources, and social movements (Brafman, 2006). For the later the mission is to improve or increase knowledge with case study of Wikipedia, and for the later the mission is specific to the social cause such as Alcoholics Anonymous (Brafman, 2006). There are a number of forms and variants that share features of DAO with corporations and with cooperatives. Here the distinguishing features of MOC from the cooperatives are the central purpose or mission as a basis to guide the design of all aspects of the institution, uniform decentralized structure throughout all scales of the organization, rules based decision making, and open access.

Principles of mission-oriented-communities — (Morell, 2014 ; Brafman, 2006)

1. Clear purpose, reason for existing that forms the basis for the rules and the membership
2. Decentralized, major changes cannot be performed unilaterally by a single member
3. Governed by rules
4. Autonomous organization and resource mobilization
5. Controlled by members, users
6. Transparent, open access

While the open membership is listed in the 7 principles for cooperatives, this is not considered as a critical characteristic as there are a number of cooperatives that are inherently closed memberships. Membership access closure could arise due to other effective constraints on membership either explicit such as citizenship or residency or implicit such as geographical reach for consumer coops or available job vacancy for worker coops. Open membership and well defined decision and contribution rules are essential for the MOC which often rely on a large voluntary contributor membership community and a small or no paid permanent membership. In some forms of DAO, it is not possible to know the total membership size of the community at any given point in time (Brafman, 2006). Unlike cooperatives which may have varying degrees of member engagement and participation, for MOC an appeal to contribute and participate is existential. High engagement is achieved through the appeal of the mission, flat democratic organizational structure, extensive operational rules and transparency.

The unique advantage of MOC is that they are one of the more successful alternative institution to the state for the provision of public goods. Social movements, industry standards, knowledge libraries are all special kinds of collective action problems that exist in the general public space and would not spontaneously resolve themselves. A cooperatives could also provide public goods but typical applications involve some form of enclosure and supply either common pool resources or private goods.

Theory of change -from competitive to cooperative economy

The second part of the hypothesis is that an economy in which a dominant share of the means of production are controlled by alternatives to the shareholder corporation would be sufficient to ensure a more equitable and sustainable outcome. The rationale is that trust and cooperation are incorporated directly where the economic decisions are made rather than an added layer of control. Using an ecosystem analogy, the economy may comprise a mix of all three models of the corporation, cooperative and MOCs, and it may not be necessary to completely eradicate the corporation to shift the character of the system as a whole. An interesting question for follow-up analysis of such an ecosystem would be to estimate what is the minimum % of cooperative ownership that is necessary to achieve the desired systemic outcomes.

The transition between the competitive economy and the cooperative economy demands a growth model, which is another open challenge for the cooperative framework. Growth in this sense is with respect to each cellular unit and not to the system as a whole. A feature of the corporation is that growth is intrinsic to the institution design. In contrast, growth is not intrinsic to the cooperative and some of the design principles may resist growth (Ettlin, 2016). On the other hand cooperatives when they are working well can outlast corporations, up to centuries (Ostrom, 1990). The corporation has a natural tendency to expire and follows a lifecycle of birth, growth and death like other organisms in biology (West, 2017). Social movement based MOCs are programmed by design to end once their social cause have succeeded (Brafman, 2006). Other knowledge based MOCs such as Wikipedia could theoretically either perpetuate indefinitely or go through a life cycle pattern.

For the case of both the cooperative and the MOC, the primary growth model is of membership growth, so a critical factor is whether the user experience of the member is more attractive than the equivalent experience from the equivalent corporate version. For a membership based on users, this would mean better quality service or product and for a worker membership, this would mean a more satisfying, meaningful and engaging work experience and or competitive pay and terms of service. The homeostasis principle is that people generally resist change so a conversation model is also necessary to understand, test and refine the steps to move individuals out of the corporate institution into the cooperative. An example of such a sequence of steps could be exposure, activation, initiation, induction and progression.

The secondary growth model which likely follows the primary growth is resource acquisition of the means of production including land, capital, access rights, relationship networks and intellectual property. As the primary membership grows, through the contribution principle members move their capital, resources into the cooperative as a secondary means of growth.

Another secondary means of growth is the cooperative of cooperative mechanism. Cooperatives can join together in larger cooperative networks to pool resources and increase bargaining power against either corporate power, general external agents such as suppliers or export markets or even the state where they have a common interest on policy reforms. The cooperative of cooperative mechanism is not bound by borders and it is encouraged to join in international cooperative networks. MOCs could fill the role of catalysts for such transformations in this growth process as the mission of a social movement.

Caveats

So what’s the catch? If it is so simple why hasn’t the transformation already occurred? There are many open questions and a few of those caveats are presented here as open challenges for the cooperative economic model.

1. Democratic or consensus based decision making may be more risk averse, slower
2. Research and development model
3. Environmental sustainability, equity outside stakeholder boundary not guaranteed
4. Rent seeking risks
5. Conflict resolutions, competing missions
6. Conventional alternative : CSR stakeholder corporation

Democratic systems tend to be more risk averse, slower decision making

The first concern is slower decision making in a democratic system (Ettlin, 2016). Intuition would predict that the costs of decision making would increase with group size, and that synthesizing preferences from a group based on majority vote for large, diverse groups could also have a conservative tendency to revert to the mean. As a group size increases, direct democracy, whereby all members vote on every issue, becomes less feasible. The costs increase both to administer and reach a consensus, and also for each of the members to take the time and research to make an informed decision. Aside from variants to simple majority vote such as ranked-choice or greater than 50% thresholds, a common solution is representative democracy, whereby members vote to elect a representative to a position where that person is in a position of authority to make a range of decisions and presumably represents their interests (Ettlin, 2016). Representative democracies can also have drawbacks of accountability and imperfect synthesis of many preferences. One common way of improving the representative model is to elect multiple representatives to separate autonomous bodies which perform specialized functions such as a general executive, ethics and legislative (Ettlin, 2016 ; Lutz, 1997). Another potential solution is a hybrid democratic decision making model “delegate” or “liquid” democracy whereby members can delegate their decision on one or several issues to another member (Ford, 2002). The costs to set up and administer a liquid democracy system could be prohibitive for small firms.

Research and development model

A common perception of private firms is that the profit motive is a more potent force motivating the necessary risk and speculative actions required for innovation. This perception however has been challenged by economists Mariana Mazzucato, who makes the case that much of the deep technology innovations from the past 30 years in Tech, Pharmaceutical and other industries in the United States can trace to publicly funded government R&D initiatives (Mazzucato, 2011). The implication is that if there is no added “intangible” factor of the profit motive, then the general process of R&D could be systematically replicated and institutionalized and implemented in a cooperative governance model. If anything, a cooperative may be stronger positioned for fundamental research if the organization achieves a more long term decision making culture in leadership.

Environmental sustainability, equity outside stakeholder boundary not guaranteed

Giving stakeholders more control of the firm by itself does not guarantee that they will look after the interest outside of the stakeholder boundary. The 7th principle of community contribution may be in name only if it is not also reflected in the norms, values and beliefs among the members. The distinction here is whether the cooperative has an intrinsic proactive motivation to contribute to the community, rather than compliance which is no different from the corporate model. Certain conditions may be less favorable, such as if the member community is relatively isolated from the outside either physically, information or culturally. Another condition that may lead to less altruistic behavior is a belief of local resource scarcity, real or imagined (Ostrom, 1990). Contact, relationships with the outside (Principle #6) and continuous education (Principle #5) are proactive measures which could increase the likelihood that members have the confidence and motivation to give away a share of the cooperative resources outside the member group.

Rent seeking

An even more extreme case of how the cooperative interfaces with the outside other than general apathy, is deliberate attempt to obtain an advantage. In economics this is known as arbitrage, or rent-seeking behavior. Rent-seeking is inherently competitive and un-cooperative but could occur if the members seek to use the cooperative primarily to promote the interests of the members at the expense of outsiders.

Conflict resolutions, competing missions

Problems could arise in the cooperative of cooperatives alliance building process. Cooperatives may have different, competing ideas and missions. For this reason the cooperative of cooperatives should also have democratic institutions for inter-cooperative decisions and issues. Conflicts can also emerge internally within a democratic framework. Simply having a democratic institution does not guarantee a conflict-free environment. Formal or informal conflict resolution mechanisms and procedures are necessary for long term health to ensure that such tensions are identified and resolved.

Conventional alternative : CSR stakeholder corporation

The conventional response in literature to the problem of shareholder capitalism is the idea of “stakeholder capitalism” (Avi-Yonah, 2005 ; Williamson, 1981) where the managers are empowered with greater accountability for the interests of stakeholders. B Corp is a non-profit alliance of existing corporations with the aim of “reducing inequality, lower levels of poverty, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and the creation of more high quality jobs with dignity and purpose” (B Corporation). The organization issues B Corp certificates as a way to build a brand so that customers, prospective employee candidates, suppliers, investors who support these ideals can voluntarily switch their resources and support to these companies to reward the behavior. This model places a high degree of trust in the managers as it does not address the information barriers and vulnerability to diffusion of responsibility inherent to the current model. To have a chance to be as effective as the cooperatives, there would need to be more robust transparency and accountability mechanisms than currently exist.

Moving forward

So where to move from here? The theory of a change roadmap either to the democratic state and or the cooperative economy should be fleshed out with enough detail that the milestones, evaluation metrics and first steps are clear. Each of the open questions and caveats should have a learning plan to resolve the uncertainty and guide strategic decisions. Throughout the process can be framed as a learning problem, both learning-by-doing and traditional research methods.

One place to start is to develop the ideas and strategies presented here into a formal theoretical framework with testable hypotheses. The theoretical work involves a clear definition of the problem description and learning objectives, followed by a literature review from others who have asked similar questions in fields of sociology, anthropology, economics and political science. Any number of research methods could be applied such as meta-review, statistical analysis or toy problems and simulations.

Theory on its own does not create change in the real world. Real validation comes from learning-by-doing. Agile management teams can set up the smallest minimum viable product (MVP) version of a co-op, mission-oriented-community, or one of the pillars of democracy such as a polling unit. Each of these early pilots should be considered as trial experiments to gain the maximum learning opportunity which can be capitalized and fed back into a larger long term strategic roadmap. Each of the components of the theory of change described — conversion model, growth model, cooperative of cooperatives can be tested through trial-and-error. Lessons learned from these pilots can then be critiqued, revised and perfected for application to broader scale reforms to existing institutions and draft policy. Just as there are two paths to social democracy via the state or via the economy, there are two paths in the learning process through theory or by practice, and in both cases progress on one path feeds into the other.

At this point there may not be enough information to know the full roadmap picture or where it will end up, but there is enough information available to know it is worthwhile to take the first steps.

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