The internal governance of cooperative enterprises and the self-management of community capital
a critical reading of the traditional economic approach
Abstract
The paper presents a critical analysis of the main lines of research that have emerged from Organizational Economics (OE) to study the internal governance (IG) processes of the cooperative enterprise (CE). The methodological debate on self-management is exposed from the confrontation of two competing agendas: the first, representative of traditional economic thought, develops a pessimistic reading of the democratic organizational model, while the second, from a synthesis of alternative contributions, proposes to address the endogenous mechanisms of IG that contribute to the successful management of CIs.
First, we systematize the arguments of the traditional perspective to dismiss the democratic administration of collective resources in CEs and then interpret the theoretical trajectory of this program from the epistemological and methodological implications of the adoption of a scientific metaphor built around the tragedy of the commons.
Finally, we analyze a body of work that evidences the capacity of cooperativists to endow the CE with successful IG mechanisms. By giving CEs a license to exist, these approaches promote a necessary change in the scientific metaphor used by OE to address self-management.
Keywords:
Organizational Economics - cooperative enterprises - self-management - organizational social capital – trustLicense
Copyright (c) 2025 Juan Munt, Gonzalo Carrión
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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