Call for Papers
Business & Society: Special Issue on “Reimagining the governance of cooperatives: The dynamics, diffusion, and consequences of governance innovations.”
Submission Deadline: Jan 31, 2025.
Guest Editors:
Frédéric Dufays, HEC Liège-Université de Liège & KU Leuven
Johanna Mair, Hertie School & Stanford University
Morshed Mannan, European University Institute
Simon Pek, University of Victoria
Business & Society Editor:
Punit Arora, City University of New York, USA
While society increasingly grapples with pressing social and environmental challenges, trust in modern-day capitalism is eroding (Holmes et al., 2022). We have seen a surge in interest among management and business and society researchers in cooperatives as a promising and influential alternative form of organizing (Mair and Rathert 2021). Among their many benefits, cooperatives can help reduce inequality (Young-Hyman et al. 2023), safeguard workers’ interests (Battilana et al. 2022), confer greater control to members over their personal data (Mannan and Pek 2021), contribute to organizational resilience (Billiet et al. 2021), and foster more responsible consumption (Papaoikonomou et al. 2012).
Cooperatives are expected to operate according to a set of cooperative principles promoted by the International Cooperative Alliance (n.d.), which include autonomy and independence, cooperation among cooperatives, and democratic member control. Adherence to these principles underpins many of the benefits of cooperatives. Democratic member control is perhaps the
central feature distinguishing cooperatives from conventional enterprises (Van Dijk et al., 2019). In addition to owning their cooperatives, members have the right and responsibility to effectively control them and shape their destiny, usually based on the principle of one member, one vote (Cornforth 2004).
However, cooperatives often find it challenging to implement and sustain democratic member control in practice. For example, cooperatives may be exposed to governance failures if they do not adapt their governance practices, as illustrated in the bankruptcy of Fagor Electrodomésticos (Basterretxea et al. 2020). Key sites of democratic participation in cooperatives, like general assemblies and boards of directors, often succumb to problems like low and unequal levels of member participation (Pek, 2023). Cooperatives have historically struggled with coordinating member participation in governance when they seek to operate beyond a local scale (Mannan, 2018) or when their membership base is heterogeneous, such as in multi-stakeholder cooperatives (Billiet et al., 2023). Finally, inadequate education and training about the importance of democratic member control have also compromised the ability of cooperatives to sustain participation (Meira and Ramos, 2023).
As such, the search for innovative approaches to cooperative governance matters more than ever. To be sure, cooperatives have long been at the forefront of developing and experimenting with novel practices to improve and sustain their democratic governance. As “laboratories for social innovation” (Novkovic 2008, p. 2168), cooperatives have long implemented innovative
governance practices like providing women with voting and eligibility rights as early as in 1884 at the Rochdale cooperative (Zamagni and Zamagni 2010), enabling proportional voting, and promoting the formation of member councils (Bijman et al. 2014). However, much room exists to expand our understanding of these and other innovations. To take one example, the growth of the platform economy and the corresponding rise of platform cooperatives (Scholz 2023) and data cooperatives (Micheli et al. 2023) opens opportunities for new approaches towards the governance of cooperatives, including by means of technologies such as blockchain. However, these new types of cooperatives also generate unprecedented challenges, such as the potentially immense geographical spread of members, coming to terms with the use of complex emerging technologies, and balancing the interests of members and nonmember investors (Mannan and Pek, 2023). Expanding our understanding of governance innovations in cooperatives will not only help cooperatives address the abovementioned challenges and achieve their social and environmental objectives but can also serve as a powerful source of inspiration for burgeoning efforts to democratize conventional enterprises (Battilana et al. 2022; Diefenbach 2020).
Accordingly, in this special issue, we seek to synthesize existing knowledge and generate new insights about innovative approaches to the governance of cooperatives centered on four key themes that we see particularly promising:
a) The application of new theories of democracy and governance to the governance of
cooperatives;
b) The inputs and processes underpinning governance innovations in cooperatives,
including the use of new and emerging technologies for such innovations;
c) The multi-layered, intended, and unintended outcomes of governance innovations in
cooperatives; and
d) The diffusion of governance innovations among cooperatives and other organizations
More details on the special issues can be found here in the call for papers.
