| Blog Post Published on: | 9th August 2025 |
| Title: | Books on the Cooperative Movement |
| Lead Author: | Fred M. Beshears |
| Type of Blog Post: | cooperative_movement |
FMB Note: This is just my list of books on the cooperative movement. The book descriptions below are not my own.
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Allemand, I.
Research Handbook on Sustainable Co-operative Enterprise
Case Studies of Organizational Resillience in the Co-operative Business Model
Co-operatives are found in all industry sectors and almost all countries around the world. However, despite their significant economic and social contributions, the academic literature has largely ignored these important businesses. This book is a detailed examination of the co-operative enterprise business model and the factors that help to enhance its sustainability and resilience, as well as those forces that lead to its destruction.
The authors synthesize theories of business model design and strategic and marketing management to examine the forces that sustain and enhance co-operative enterprise. Organized into six themes and focussed on five key research questions, the chapters explore case studies from around the world and across a wide range of industries and aim to stimulate debate.
This comprehensive work expands upon existing research whilst introducing new concepts, and will appeal to both academics and practitioners. It will also interest managers of co-operative enterprises and those who seek to better understand this unique type of business.
Contributors: I. Allemand, I.A. Berriozabalgotia, J. Bijman, J.Birchall, B. Brullebaut, N. Byrne, F.R. Chaddad, D. Clark, M.L. Cook, M.E. Fulton, Y. Gao, M. Gmür, I. Hatak, C. Iliopoulos, E. Juno-Delgado, R. Lang, Q. Liang, E. Mamouni Limnios, M. Martin, T. Mazzarol, M. Mazzoli, O. McCarthy, M. McCulloch, B. Plunkett, G. Quadrelli, S. Raimbault, S. Reboud, E. Reiner, D. Roessl, S. Sacchetti, L. Savery, R. Simmons, C. Sinapi, G.N. Soutar, P. Suter, C. Tanguy, I. Theodorakopoulou, E.C. Tortia, F.N. Uzea, M. Ward, G. Whyatt, X. Xu
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Battilani, Patrizia
The Cooperative Business Movement, 1950 to the Present
edited by Patrizia Battilani and Harm G. Schroter
2012
The United Nations declared 2012 the year of cooperatives, emphasizing that there is an alternative to privately owned firms. While greed and mismanagement have caused world financial and economic crises, co-ops offer another type of business for economic activities that is less exposed to aggressive capitalism. This book provides a problem-oriented overview of the development of cooperatives over the last fifty years. The worldwide study addresses the major challenges cooperatives face, such as the organizational innovations introduced in order to acquire necessary risk-capital and implement growth-related strategies, the wave of demutualization in developed nations and their ability to construct an original consumer politics. The contributors to this volume discuss the successes and failures of the cooperatives and ask whether they are an outdated model of enterprise. They document a wave of foundations of new co-ops, new forms of collaboration between them, and a growing trend toward globalization. Generally speaking they show that this special kind of business will doubtless continue to thrive and to maintain an important position in a rapidly changing world economy.
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Nadeau, E.G.
The Cooperative Solution
How the United States can tame recessions, reduce inequality, and protect the environment
by E.G. Nadeau
2012
This book illustrates the potential for cooperatives -- organizations that are owned and democratically controlled by the people they serve -- to infuse the US economy with the basic value of democracy and to provide citizens with a means to effectively address the shortcomings of the market-driven economy. The book makes the case that cooperatives are the solution to many of the major economic, social, and environmental problems in the United States today. The basic tenet of the essay is that co-ops are democratically controlled and are motivated primarily by the goal of providing services to their members, not by generating profits for their owners and investors. As a result of this democratic, services-first design, co-ops are much more likely to avoid the negative consequences of economic institutions primarily driven by the quest for ever-increasing profits. This latter model of economic development has led to over 200 years of economic instability, inequality, and environmental degradation in the United States. In the coming decades, co-ops can lead the way to undoing these fundamental flaws in our economic system.
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Rothschild, Joyce
The Cooperative Workplace:
Potentials and Dilemmas of Organisational Democracy and Participation
June 30, 1989
by Joyce Rothschild (Author), J. Allen Whitt (Author)
American Sociological Association Rose Monographs
Over the last several years worker cooperatives of many kinds have sprung up all around the world. As a result, industrial relations in the workplace have changed dramatically as workers have come to own and run their own enterprises. This book provides evidence on how these new enterprises are functioning today. Using evidence from their extensive research in various such firms, the authors identify the consequences for both the organisation and the workers when those who do the work also manage. Setting forth an original theory of democratic organisations, they reveal the very real dilemmas and trade-offs that democratic work organisations face, as well as the specific conditions in which workplace democracy flourishes or declines.
Notes on the Cooperative Workplace by Joyce Rothschild
https://memeinnovation.wordpress.com/2020/05/18/notes-on-the-cooperative-workplace-by-joyce-rothschild/
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Warren, Jerome Nikolai
Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management
Jerome Nikolai Warren (Editor), Lucio Biggiero (Editor), Jamin Hübner (Editor), Kemi Ogunyemi (Editor)
Cooperatives have spread across virtually all continents. Today, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) recognises over 3 million cooperatives with 1 billion cooperative members or about 12% of the human population and serving many more members of the public, collectively owning trillions in assets. This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject and the current state of affairs with regard to the study of cooperation in the economy generally and of the cooperative and related sectors particularly.
It highlights the essential issues and debates; provides a future research agenda, outlining the distinctions and similarities between individual and (inter)organisational cooperation; and explores the connections of cooperative economics and management to fundamental ethical principles. This book examines coopetition and the similarities and differences between competitive economics and cooperative economics, identifying to what extent and how cooperative economics and management are more capable of addressing the problems of global neoliberalism, such as ecological collapse, wealth inequity, value capture, and distribution, including via online platforms and social/relational problems.
This book offers a variety of new research and theory‑building from various disciplines, particularly focusing on the fields of economics and management but extending beyond these disciplines to domains such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science. It will become the standard reference work for not only a broad and large audience of scholars, researchers, and students but also interested professionals, policymakers, regulators, and cooperators in the field wishing to orient themselves in a global, rapidly developing movement and field of study with reference to issues of producing and allocating resources and focusing on the impact of cooperation on issues like risk, trust, the development of preferences, institutional governance, networks, and inequity.
Global Cooperative Economics and Movements (1st edition)
by Jerome Nikolai Warren (Editor), Kemi Ogunyemi (Editor), Asia Guerreschi (Editor), Maciej Szulc (Editor)
This title has not yet been released. (As of 2025-08-09)
Cooperatives are traditionally recognized as marginal players in the economic sector, but their role in policymaking and in social arenas has garnered even less attention. Over the past two decades, an extensive body of literature in management science and economics has arisen, designating non-capitalistic enterprises as subjects of particular attention. In the context of rising global challenges like economic inequality, environmental sustainability, and labor rights, the role of cooperatives has become increasingly relevant. This book examines the practical and policy dimensions and implications of cooperative economics and movement(s). It delves into the more politicized aspects of cooperatives, exploring how they intersect with global movements, social justice, policymaking, and grassroots activism and provides insights into real struggles tackled by this enterprise form. It offers an understanding of how communication in cooperatives plays a role in promoting principles, values and practices and how these are transferred across generations of cooperators. It provides a deeper understanding of the elements of intergenerational evolution within cooperatives in concepts on employment and labour as new policies are raising expectations. Further, it offers a broad variety of global case studies pertinent to issues of relevance to cooperative economics and management, profiling how different types of cooperatives on six continents can promote sustainability and self-organized community wealth-generation, connecting to development studies, ethics and political economy, while revealing how cooperatives can address the current challenges of the digital age, especially including issues of data governance and artificial intelligence. The book will serve as an invaluable tool for anyone seeking to understand the broader implications of cooperative models in today's globalized world.