Jeod Articles

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Editorial: Community-Based, Collaborative Solutions to Sustainable Economic Development in and around Biosphere Reserves

This is the introductory article to the JEOD Special Issue on “Community-Based, Collaborative Solutions to Sustainable Economic Development in and around Biosphere Reserves”. In introducing the topic, we make the case for joining the experience of practitioners and scholars in the writing of the issue articles. We outline an institutionalist… Read More

Peter Utting (Ed.): Social and Solidarity Economy beyond the Fringe

The collected volume edited by Peter Utting with chapters by Suzanne Bergeron, Stephen Healy, Carina Millstone, Bénédicte Fonteneau, Georgina Gómez, Marguerite Mendell, Paul Nelson, John-Justin McMurtry, Cecilia Rossel, Abhijit Ghosh, Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, JeanLouis Laville, Justine Nannyonjo, Bina Agarwal, Béatrice Alain, Cristina Grasseni, Francesca Forno, Silvana Signori, Darryl Reed, Roldan Muradian,… Read More

Challenging the Degeneration Thesis: the Role of Democracy in Worker Cooperatives?

This paper uses data collected through written narratives, focus groups and participant observation in three small UK worker cooperatives to investigate the role of democracy in maintaining cooperatives’ dual social-economic characteristic and resisting degeneration. More specifically, it adds to limited empirical literature countering the degeneration thesis by arguing that ongoing… Read More

The 1980s Worker Co-operative Buyout Experience in Australia. Learning from Praxis

This article examines one of the most important experiments in workplace democracy in Australia, a worker buyout programme in the industrial heartland of Greater Western Sydney, which was initiated by the New South Wales Government in the economic downturn of the 1980s recession. Here a government programme facilitated the purchase… Read More

Social and Solidarity Economy in a Neoliberal Context: Transformative or Palliative?

The Case of an Argentinean Worker Cooperative Neoliberalisation process was imposed worldwide and it made many grassroots responses emerge, which many can be conceptualised as part of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE). Within this field, worker co-operatives appear as an option to mainly safeguard employment and earn a living. Read More

Worker Cooperatives as Based on First Principles

The purpose of this paper is to go back to the first principles of democracy and private property, and to show that they are violated by the conventional firms based on the employment relations and are satisfied by the legal form of a worker cooperative. The conventional bundle of rights… Read More

On the Advantages of a System of Labour-managed Firms

This paper offers an outline of a large body of economic literature which discusses the advantages of a system of employee-managed firms: the disempowerment of capitalists thanks to the suppression of their right to make decisions in cooperative firms; appreciable efficiency gains from worker involvement in production processes; a softer… Read More

Property rights and efficiency in the care sector. Evidence from Italy

In this paper, we examine the main empirical contributions pertaining to the relationships between productive efficiency and proprietary forms in the care sector. International evidence indicates that non-profit organisations (NPOs) are likely to be less cost-efficient but more attentive to service quality. According to evidence from Italy, however, NPOs are… Read More

Cooperation among Cooperatives in Italian and Comparative Law

A study of a cooperative as an isolated economic unit, with no relations with other cooperatives, would provide only an incomplete and inaccurate picture of its full scope. In fact, from their emergence, cooperatives have developed economic and socio-political forms of inter-cooperative integration, which have enormously contributed to their success… Read More

The Advantages of Association: Know-How Sharing and Innovation Adoption in Four Brazilian Cities

This paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of different types of innovation in four urban areas of Brazil. A unique dataset of small sized firms in 19 economic sectors is used to show evidence that entrepreneurs who are members of trade associations (TAs) tend to adopt… Read More