Cooperative Ownership Research Articles

Homeowners association vs. leasehold

Homeowners association (HOA) and leasehold (such as shopping mall) are two important types of urban institutions that have been developing very fast worldwide. The model developed in this paper is built on Hart–Moore model on cooperative vs. outside ownership by incorporating a distinctive feature of urban land use: the transaction and consumption of land is bundled with that of collective goods. The focus is placed on the ex post pricing efficiency of providing collective goods. The impacts of endogenous outside market and the capitalization of collective goods into land price are also discussed. Findings suggest that HOAs are likely to be located in more competitive markets such as the suburbs. Rich communities may prefer HOA while leasehold is more common for poor communities. Leasehold also becomes more efficient when the capitalization effect is weaker.

Owning Maine’s Future: Fostering a Cooperative Economy in Maine

Maine’s economy faces a host of well-known challenges: reliance on natural resource extraction or low-quality service jobs, geographic isolation, challenging climate, and out-migration, especially of young adults. Staying on this course is undesirable, but traditional economic development fixes have had limited success. The authors examine the possibilities of making cooperatively owned businesses a central feature of Maine’s economy. They outline the characteristics, benefits, and challenges of cooperatives and identify six important sectors of the Maine economy in which cooperative ownership already plays an important role or could make more contributions to economic and community vitality. The authors describe several other regions, with a focus on Finland, with strong cooperative economies or businesses, and examine the socioeconomic benefits and institutional features that encourage the development of cooperatives. The article concludes with policy recommendations that could facilitate similar outcomes in Maine.

Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

HOA vs. Leasehold

HOA (homeowners association) and leasehold (such as shopping mall) are two important types of urban institutions that have been developing very fast worldwide. This paper extends Hart-Moore model on cooperative vs. outside ownership to the urban setting by incorporating a distinctive feature of urban land use: the transaction and consumption of land is bundled with that of collective goods. The focus is placed on the ex post pricing efficiency of providing collective goods. The impacts of endogenous outside market and the capitalization of collective goods into land price are also discussed. Findings suggest that HOAs are likely to be located in more competitive market such as the suburbs. Rich communities may prefer HOA while leasehold is more common for poor communities. Leasehold also becomes more efficient when the capitalization effect is weaker.

Polish Residential Property Market During Economic Slowdown Exemplified by a Medium-Size Town

The main objective of this paper is to examine the dynamics of downward trends in the residential property prices exemplified by a medium-size city. A hypothesis is made that the dynamics of the decline of residential property prices in the times of crisis is much poorer in medium-size cities than in large urban agglomeration. The analysis deals with the West Pomeranian city of Koszalin with the population of 108,6 thousand. The study covers the quarters of 7 years between 2009 and 2015. The object of the study is a secondary market of residential property and cooperative ownership right to residential property. The analyses were conducted by means of mathematical statistics tools. The findings of the study on the residential property market in Koszalin are presented in reference to the data on residential property markets in 17 of Poland’s largest cities. The data come from the Register of Property Prices and Value of the Municipal Surveying and Cartographic Documentation Centre in Koszalin Center and from the Database of Residential Property Prices of the Polish National Bank.

Financial instruments and equity structures for raising capital in co-operatives

Purpose– A key issue faced by co-operative enterprises is how to raise external equity capital without compromising member control. The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of a special type of financial instrument called a Cooperative Capital Unit (CCU) introduced into the Australian legislation to facilitate external investment while maintaining member control.Design/methodology/approach– A Delphi panel and six focus groups were used to provide an understanding of the challenges associated with cooperative governance and financing and to aid the development of a conceptual framework for the implementation of CCUs.Findings– The findings from these Delphi panel and six focus groups were used to develop a proposed framework that the authors believe will be useful in structuring equity-like instruments depending on the purposes they might serve. In particular, the authors propose a new form of cooperative ownership and equity structure that could: better align member and investor interests; provide a mechanism to strengthen one role over the other depending on the needs of the cooperative; and provide investors with a better sense of security while retaining member control.Originality/value– To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the cooperative ownership and equity structure proposed in this study are novel and not currently found in theory or practice. The insights provided by this study should, therefore, be of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including cooperatives; professional advisors to these businesses; government regulators; investors; and researchers.

スウェーデンにおける1990年代以降の住宅政策の転換およびストックホルムにおける居住状況の変化に関する考察

Sweden is famous as social democratic welfare state. This status had started to turn to neoliberalism and privatization in various administrative measures after 1990's, not only education, medical, social services but also housing policy and housing provision. Reffering to the history of housing policy, this country had established housing safety net for all citizens, including the elderly, the disabled and low-income person. Referring to those current situation in Sweden, the purposes of this study is to verify the function of safety net after housing policy and market were deregulated and privetalized. To achieve this purpose, I attempted literature reviews, statistical survey referring to statistical yearbook published by Stockholm country council and Stockholm city and interviews with researchers and city assemblyman in Stockholm. From the results of statistics sturvey, it become clear that a large part of housing stock in 2011 were cooperative ownership, the proportion of elderly people and household receiving welfare allowance were gradually decreasing in the central part of Stockholm. On the other hand the housing stock of public rental housing were still large number and the income level of those area were lower than household in west and south part of Stockholm. Accoring to the interviews, I found that following situations. suburbs in west and south of stockholm faced stigmatized situation. Specially many young people have fallen no education and unemployment, and many comercial and medical facilities have withdrawn in Jalvafeltet. In the central part of Stockholm, elderly household could not keep their lives, even though they have recieved housing allowance. From the results of analysis, it becomes clear that conversion of housing policy in Sweden has led to the emergence of housing segregation in Stockholm, and safety net for the elderly in Stockholm had became dysfunctional.

Land City District Zoning Areas for the Development and Use of the Unified Management and Operation of the Housing Stock

In this paper we suggest the idea of using the housing and construction cooperatives and functional zoning of the territory of the district, the project of the integrated development of the city district. The authors develop this project in conjunction with the cooperative ownership of the land in order to form a hierarchical system of the government common property and the development of a civil self-government system. It is believed that the idea of using the housing cooperative for the common property will allow homeowners to carry out the common life in a common area in the most efficient way.

Which capitalism for Poland?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight the direction of economic changes affecting the Polish economy after the political transformation of the early 1990s. Design/methodology/approach – First, the author defines the phenomenon of cognitive capitalism. Subsequently, the social and psychological consequences of this form of management and its ideological character are presented. Finally, the effects of the application of cognitive capitalism to the Polish reality are considered and the desirable adjustments of the Polish capitalism are suggested. Findings – According to the theses of the paper: the negative effects of the Polish economic transformation are largely the result of an uncritical acceptance of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism, and the fight against the high social costs of the functioning of market economy calls for an adjustment of the Polish economy, which would bring it closer to the Scandinavian model of capitalism. Research limitations/implications – The paper shows the process of economic transformation in Poland from the perspective of the changes taking place in the bosom of the western capitalism, in particular of the Anglo-Saxon type. Practical implications – The author of the paper suggests a number of possible adjustments to the Polish model of capitalism, in particular calling for the introduction of elements of planning and state intervention into the model, the revival of municipal and cooperative ownership, as well as the introduction of corporatist practices. Originality/value – The author of the paper criticizes the thesis of the inevitability of the radically liberal transformation of the Polish economy, widely accepted in the literature. Moreover, he sees the relationship between the Polish free-market changes and the processes of “cognitivization” of western capitalism.

Cultural Treasures or Cash Cows?

Throughout history, the value of art collections has often been too great an enticement to avoid their commodification. Nonetheless, museum advocates must fight to retain their collections even amidst pressure from forces that hold financial control and ultimate decision-making power over them. A case could be made that some view collections as cultural treasures while others view them as cash cows. For instance, the city of Detroit's bankruptcy, due to the national economic downturn and the decline of the city's economic strength, has fostered discussions of selling the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection. That city's financial—and cultural—crisis parallels situations faced by some museums that are nested in colleges and universities. The sagas of four museums nested in institutions of higher education are explored and compared: The Maier Museum at Randolph College; The Rose Museum at Brandeis University; Fisk University; and The University of Iowa. In a final analysis of these case studies and broader concerns, the authors advocate for nested museums to take a strong stance of financial self-sufficiency by creating cooperative ownership networks with other museums. Such a model aims to keep art collections safe from sale by continually keeping them on display at different museum locations while protecting their status as works kept for the public in perpetuity.

Efficiency in Employee-Owned Enterprises

The authors undertake the first econometric study of efficiency for Eroski, the largest member of the Mondragon group of worker cooperatives. Three types of stores are found within Eroski: 1) cooperatives with significant employee ownership and voice; 2) cooperatives with modest employee ownership and limited voice (known as GESPAs); and 3) conventional stores with no employee ownership. Key data are monthly observations—9,800 for supermarkets and 2,150 for hypermarkets (large superstores combining supermarkets and department stores). By estimating first-difference models, the authors find that hypermarket stores with cooperative ownership have significantly faster sales growth than do GESPA stores. For supermarkets overall, they find no significant differences in performance among the three types of stores. For a subgroup of small supermarkets, however, cooperatives outperform conventional stores. To investigate the mechanisms that help explain why cooperatives perform better, the authors provide additional evidence that takes into account the more extensive opportunities for employee involvement, training, and stronger economic incentives in cooperatives. While cooperative members are better paid than peers in comparable firms, individual data show that job satisfaction is lower for cooperative workers than for GESPA workers. Though this may reflect higher worker expectations in cooperatives, alternatively cooperatives may constitute a “high-stress work system.”

Retrieving the Co-operative Value-Based Leadership Model of Terry Thomas

The paper documents the post-war retrenchment and failure of the post-war British Consumer Co-operative Movement. In contrast to the general failure one CEO, Terry Thomas stands out both for his success in co-operative rebranding and returning to profitability the UK Co-operative Bank and because he alone amongst the top echelons of the Co-operative Groups Management based his strategies on a clearly articulated philosophy based on his understanding of the values and purpose of the co-operative movement rooted in its historical traditions grounded in the writings and achievements of Robert Owen, The paper goes on to provide a case study of the bank’s process of transformation from loss-making subsidiary to the first positive co-operative national brand in the post-war period of its history. The author argues that lack of appropriate vision based on the founding values and purposes of the Co-operative Movement is the principal reason for the management’s and governance failures that have beset the UK Co-operative Group. Instead of using the past to help in understanding the present and planning for the future, the UK Co-operative Group Leadership ignored it or worse used the past successes to congratulate itself and disguise its manifest failures. In this, they were supported by an uncritical Co-operative Union (later renamed Co-operatives UK). Davis argues large co-operatives cannot be managed by a civil service responsible to an elected board. Co-operatives need a servant-leadership model of professional management dedicated to the transformational goals set by the founders of the co-operative movement. This needs a radical rethink and promotion of co-operative management education and a dedicated executive recruitment that seeks out value-based professionals whose attitudes and values are compatible with Co-operative values, ownership and purpose.

The Immigration Hotel

The image of a hotel with each floor representing different immigration statuses provides a way to introduce students to the confounding immigration system we have in the United States, on both technical and policy levels. The imagery of the hotel helps to explain how one gets into the immigration hotel (the admissions process), and also how one gets kicked out (through various forms of removal proceedings). Analogies to different forms of eviction allow for parallels as well, depending on the nature of the building in question (e.g. hotel room, apartment, or condo) and the legal status of the person being removed (temporary traveler, renter/lease holder, home owner). Drawing on property law also allows for different floors to represent different types of immigration status. In a nutshell, citizenship occupies the top floor and is akin to cooperative or condominium ownership. Legal permanent residency occupies the apartment floor, with occupants tied to leases with strict terms. Breaking the terms of the lease can lead to eviction (i.e., deportation). Traditional hotel rooms are reserved for temporary non-immigrant visa holders. Sandwiched on a hard-to-get-to floor between the apartments and the hotel rooms is the sanctuary: a place for refugees, survivors of crimes and human trafficking, unaccompanied children, and those stranded in the US as the result of natural and human made disasters in their homelands. The lobby serves not only as the admissions entry point, but also as a place of legal limbo (sort of like an easement), where people are sometime allowed to hangout for years on end in renewable quasi-status like parole and deferred action. Finally, the basement holds those without status – either they never had it, by entering unauthorized at an unregulated entry point; or those who entered legally but have violated their terms of status. The cellar or dungeon is immigration detention. The building analogy proves durable – both on the surface as an explanatory heuristic (e.g., “citizenship is like ownership”) and as a way to explore the history behind immigration categories (e.g., who has been entitled to citizenship mirrors who has been entitled to own real property). Parallels between the history of property real ownership and its protection (through the use of restrictive covenants) and the history of immigration regulation (such as the Chinese Exclusion Acts) illustrate how the analogy can also do more than just explain the current operation of immigration law, but illuminate how the laws came into being in larger historical context. Racial and economic barriers to real property ownership and control are often paralleled in the immigration hotel – the poor and marginalized often face high challenges to securing immigration status as well as stable and living situations.

The co-operative model as a ‘living experiment in democracy’

Theories regarding the purposes and justifications of property guide in part the way in which American business enterprises are run today. This raises the question – if purely capitalist corporations are founded upon an understanding of property most in line with the theories of established property scholars Bentham and Locke, is there room for a different kind of concept of property in the realm of U.S. business? In this paper I explore the way in which the workers’ cooperative model infuses a sense of moral responsibility into a group of individuals’ understanding of “property” in order to create a collectively managed enterprise that measures success both in economic and socio-political terms. I first review a large body of literature on the various forms of cooperative ownership and management, focusing on the history of the co-operative model, the rights entailed under the model, and the advantages as well as criticisms associated with co-operatives. I then use this literature to situate a case study example of a co-operative organization – The Cheese Board Collective, a worker-owned artisan cheese and pizza shop in Berkeley, California – and to analyze my findings.

Crisis, Recovery, and the Transitional Economy: The Struggle for Cooperative Ownership in Greensboro, North Carolina

There is much to ponder as the patchwork of American society continues to unravel from the effects of a new type of capitalist depression.… [T]he wealthiest 1% of Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country’s household income in 2012, their biggest share since 1928, a year before the Wall Street stock-market collapse.… [For an alternative to this] we might look to Occupy’s brief history beyond Wall Street—that is, in the cities and towns where its initial energy was so keenly felt, and where it is likely that many of us have since embarked on new projects that carry the potential of a transitional and transformational politics.… Such is the case in Greensboro, North Carolina, a mid-size Southern city known for its struggles for civil rights and socio-economic justice. It is here where the Occupy movement played a small but seminal role in what has become a fierce, grass-roots struggle for cooperative ownership in the African-American community. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Food Justice and the Challenge to Neoliberalism

As popular interest in food and agriculture has grown, so have an array of social movements intent on improving the ways we grow, raise, process, sell, and consume our sustenance. While scholars tend to agree with activists’ critical assessments of the failures of the industrial, corporate, chemically intensive food system, they often wonder whether the sustainable, local alternatives that activists recommend are sufficient for broad social transformation. Two scholarly critiques of US alternative food systems revolve around issues of food justice, meaning the ways that race, class, and gender affect who can produce and consume what kinds of foods, and neoliberalism, which refers to activists’ privileging of voluntary, market-centric strategies over those that appeal to the regulatory power of the state. This paper lays out three strategies through which the work of US food justice activists can address both critiques. These include cooperative ownership, organizing labor, and pushing to outlaw risky technologies. However, rather than being at odds with the alternative foods market, each strategy makes use of it as a venue from which to draw targeted support.

What Roles for Energy Cooperatives in the Diffusion of Distributed Generation Technologies?

Whereas a centralized model of electricity infrastructure is still dominant today, many scholars advocate the diffusion of distributed generation technologies, implying geographically dispersed and small-scale generation units located close to consumers. However, there exist various barriers of different natures to a large-scale penetration of these technologies. In this article, we focus on the behavioral and psychological ones, emphasizing the roles that citizens have to play in this issue. More specifically, we explore a specific way of involving citizens in such diffusion, namely energy cooperatives. After presenting the driving forces of the emergence of cooperative firms in the energy sector, we examine the assets of the cooperative ownership structure from the perspectives of behavioral economics and social psychology. Our analysis enables us to build a model of how cooperatives may enhance consumer engagement in the diffusion of distributed generation technologies. This provides a basic theoretical framework for future empirical research.

Surplus distribution and characteristics of social enterprises: Evidence from microfinance

The issue of surplus distribution has hardly been analyzed in the context of the social economy. This paper highlights the main drivers of distribution between various stakeholders of microfinance institutions (MFIs), which are an example of social enterprises. We focus on three major variables: size, governance structure and subsidies. Our results show that the size of the institution is the main indicator of the surplus that the organization keeps as a self-financial margin. Moreover, MFIs with a cooperative ownership structure allocate a larger part of their surplus to their employees, whereas non-profit organizations and shareholder-firm MFIs do not allocate their surplus in a significantly different way among their main stakeholders. Finally, we do not find any clear-cut effect of subsidies on the surplus allocation process.

Which Cooperative Ownership Model Performs Better? A Financial‐Decision Aid Approach

ABSTRACTIn this article the financial/ownership structures of agribusiness cooperatives are analyzed to examine whether new cooperative models perform better than the more traditional ones. The assessment procedure introduces a new financial decision‐aid approach, which is based on data‐analysis techniques in combination with a preference ranking organization method of enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE II). The application of this multicriteria decision‐aid approach allows the rank ordering of cooperatives based on the most prominent financial ratios. The financial ratios were selected using principal component analysis. This analytical procedure reduces the dimensionality of large numbers of interrelated financial performance measures. We assess the financial success of Dutch agribusiness cooperatives for the period 1999–2010. Results show that there is no clear‐cut evidence that cooperative models used to attract extra members’ investments and/or outside equity perform better than the more traditional models. This suggests that ownership structure of cooperatives is not always a decisive factor for their financial success. [EconLit citations: Q130, G320, C440].

Control Rights, Governance, and the Costs of Ownership in Agricultural Cooperatives

ABSTRACTAgricultural cooperatives have changed considerably in recent decades. In witnessing these structural changes, scholars have proffered analyses of nontraditional ownership models focusing on residual claim rights. However, crucial information on the allocation of control rights in cooperatives is missing. This study sheds light on alternative ownership‐control models adopted by agricultural cooperatives in different regions across the world. In each of these models, we describe the allocation of formal control rights with a focus on decision management and decision control rights. We thus provide empirical evidence on the “separation of ownership and control” in agricultural cooperatives. We also analyze each of the governance models in terms of the associated ownership costs, including risk‐bearing costs, the costs of controlling managers, and collective decision‐making costs. In doing so, we are able to better understand the forces influencing the organizational efficiency of each cooperative model.