This paper shows how a worker cooperative can serve as an ESOP-like employee-ownership vehicle to make a partial or total buyout of a conventional company.
Review of Erik O. Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias
January 9, 2017 by
I rarely review books and almost never books by Marxists. However, in order to comment on a presentation at a conference, I decided to write up my extensive comments in the form of a book review of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.
Review of Dahl’s Preface to Economic Democracy
January 9, 2017 by
This is my review in Commonweal of Robert A. Dahl’s 1985 book Preface to Economic Democracy shortly after it was published.
Labor theory of property and Marginal productivity theory
April 17, 2016 by
This is a reprint from the journal Economic Thought of a paper on the labor theory of property and the neoclassial theory of marginal productivity.
Three Themes about the Mondragon cooperatives
January 1, 2014 by
This is a preprint of a paper developing three themes, capital structure, active learning, and spinoffs, with special attention to the Mondragon cooperatives.
Harvard Business School Case: Mondragon
December 12, 2012 by
This is a reprint of Case No. 1-384-270. Harvard Business School 1984. It gives an overall view of the Mondragon cooperative movement of the Basque country in northern Spain as it was in the early 1980s.
Book review on plywood coops
December 9, 2012 by
This book on the plywood coops is written by an academic economist who is sympathetic to worker cooperatives, but just repeats the standard criticisms as if he were unaware of the solutions and counterarguments. Hence I wrote the review to once again point out the solutions and counterarguments.
What is a worker cooperative
December 7, 2012 by
This is the late-70s ICA pamphlet that introduced people to worker cooperatives.
The Legal Structure of Worker Cooperatives
December 7, 2012 by
This is the first paper to analyze all the different varieties of worker-owned firms as well as conventional firms in terms of how they parse the bundle of rights in a firm.
3 Hats Paper
December 6, 2012 by
This is the “famous” 3-hats paper that first laid out the ICA model for a worker cooperative and that clarified how different rights would be assigned to different functional roles (“hats”) in a worker cooperative.