Producer Cooperatives

Abstract

Producer cooperatives are a form of work organization that differs from traditional capitalist organizations in two key features relating to governance structures. Traditional firms in advanced Western economies are typically owned and controlled by a capitalist or by a large number of external stock owners. With producer cooperatives, membership is restricted to those who work in them, and, more importantly, they are both owned and controlled by all or by a large part of their workforce (Cornforth 1992; Cornforth, Thomas, Lewis, & Spear 1988). Producer cooperatives also tend to implement democratic rather than non‐democratic governance structures. These democratic features include the election of management by all the workers who are also owners. In some cases, workplace democracy includes the implementation of a separate judicial system such as an internal court system with elected judges (see Darr & Lewin 2001 for a discussion of democratic justice regimes in taxi cooperatives). Unlike other collectives where members share the authority over decision‐making, a producer cooperative is usually characterized by a division of labor between those who only work and those who also or only manage (Cornforth et al. 1988: 155). Stated differently, collectives such as different forms of communes tend to implement participatory, or direct, democratic structures, while producer cooperatives tend to institute a representative, or an indirect, workplace democracy, or sometimes different combinations of direct and indirect democratic procedures in decision‐making (see Greenberg 1986: 30–2).