This article in the Journal of Business Ethics originates from a workshop on democratic innovation and governance organized by the IICADD in cooperation with the Centre de Recherche en Éthique in 2024.
In the article Gabriel Monette (IICADD), Rafael Ziegler (IICADD) and Simon Pek (University of Victoria) observe that cooperatives, despite their commitments to democratic member control and concern for community, often struggle to prioritize the interests of their members and non-member stakeholders. Research on cooperatives has identified many remedies, though these remedies are fragmented. The authors adopt the lens of republican political philosophy to advance a framework for an integrated analysis of these challenges centered on the principle of non-domination. After defining domination in the context of cooperatives and elaborating how it can affect both members and non-member stakeholders, they develop a comprehensive framework of republican cooperative governance anchored in Hirschman’s model of exit, voice, and loyalty. In doing so, the paper makes two main contributions to research at the nexus of research on cooperatives, business ethics, and political philosophy. First, the conception of domination in cooperatives advances the limited but growing republican research on cooperatives and the challenges they face by spotlighting the importance of attending to non-member stakeholder domination and distilling distinctive types of member domination. Second, overcoming insufficient attention to loyalty to date, the comprehensive framework builds on exit, voice, and critical loyalty to elaborate how organizational and societal remedies can be integrated towards a comprehensive republican approach to cooperatives and cooperative economies.
Read the full text of the article here : https://rdcu.be/ft662
