| Just my experience here, but: A badly run cooperative fails because the people involved don't take it seriously, or lose their alignment and break apart. A well run cooperative fails (or succeeds) for all the usual reasons any business does. A well run coop ends up feeling a lot like a small business with a traditional structure, and an owner who respects their employees and doesn't act like a tyrant. That's cool, but it's a lot of work to reproduce the performance characteristics of an existing technology. I've been involved in many sessions where we tried to experiment with the structure and mechanics of how a cooperative works, in order to address what seem to be persistent shortcomings in the model. Nobody has really cracked the code yet, in my opinion. When it comes down to it, having done both, I think I'd rather work for a good boss at a small company than be in another coop, even a good one. I want someone competent to do all the behind the scenes work, and make most of the decisions, asking me for my opinion on the things that affect me directly or for which my expertise can provide some direct insight. The advantages: If I don't like the company, I can leave without feeling like I've failed: there are no non-work relationships, or sense of ownership holding me there. I don't have to attend additional meetings. I don't have to look at budgets. I don't have to be on a committee or working group. I don't have to pick a side and convince the other side of anything. If the company makes a bad decision, I say "ha ha, those morons did it again" and keep on doing my job. In short, as I have come to identify less with work, I have become less interested in the cooperative model because the value of ownership has gone down. |
Until a multi-billion company aquires the corporate