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Electric cooperatives may be seen as an alternative form of organizing in the shadow of investor-owned utilities. They are presumed able to meet financial challenges while simultaneously honoring cooperative principles of member-owners. This paper aims to investigate such a balancing act and conceptualize “key performance indicators” (KPIs) as a dramatic accounting discourse.

This paper uses a dramaturgical approach to cooperative performance accounting, and claims that KPIs are a simplification of a complex and shifting reality which they also socially construct. Data were gathered from annual financial reports and websites of rural electric cooperatives along with semi-structured interviews conducted with senior cooperative officials.

The cooperatives in this case study reported a huge number of KPIs. However, this paper reveals that the performance indicators serve impression management goals and operational demands rather than reporting on fulfillment of the “Seven Cooperative Principles” that are fundamental to the cooperative movement.

Extant inquiry regarding electric cooperatives tends toward a positivist research approach and a realist worldview. This overlooks dramatic and critical possibilities of KPIs as a management construction project. Expanding beyond mainstream research, this paper calls attention to artistic production of knowledge and applies a qualitative framework to problematize accounting disclosures.

Prior KPI research has often been instrumental, looking for predictive evidence that KPIs have strategic value as a “tool” for organizations to attain competitive advantage. This paper introduces the notion that performance measures are theatrical, and applies this to rural electric cooperatives, an industry mostly ignored in the academic literature.

Credit unions offer an alternative to traditional banking given their distinctive ownership structure and their goal of maximising members’ benefits. Motivated by the increased expectations regarding more ethical behaviour in the financial industry, this paper aims to provide a better understanding of the relevant features and values that facilitated the emergence of the credit union movement in Australia.

Using social movement theory, this study analyses 23 interviews conducted in the early 1990s with the supporters of the credit union movement in Australia, in which the characteristics and values of the credit union movement are identified.

Findings demonstrate that the credit union ethos is rooted in family and religious influences, and that these organisations were keen on promoting their distinctiveness on “fairness” and “caring for their members”. Credit unions, however, have rarely tackled the movement’s most neglected value “cooperation between cooperatives”.

This research contributes to the discussion of ethics in business history as it elaborates on how values and ethos crafted the identity and ensured the survival of the credit union movement in Australia.

This study analyses and presents the main differences that exist in the quality of management as practised by Cooperative and Non-Cooperative companies in the Basque Country within the industrial and company services sectors. The results obtained suggest that the quality level of cooperative company management is higher than that shown in the non-cooperative sector, the principal differences in quality of management being related to aspects where the social commitment of a company is reflected. These results prove to be more conclusive within the subgroup of cooperatives that are incorporated within the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC).

While a comparative study of the literature on accounting as a profession and on cooperatives reveals important differences in the values embodied by certified public accountants and by cooperators, the purpose of this study is to explore whether such differences lead to an insurmountable incompatibility or may possibly be mitigated and eventually overcome.

The study focuses on a French public accounting firm’s project to become a worker cooperative. Drawing on methodological insights from actor–network theory (ANT), the study analyses a situation in which the certified public accountants try to convince some cooperators of the merits of their project.

The case studied suggests that accounting as a profession and cooperatives are irreconcilable. It not only confirms that some of their contrasting features (identified in the literature) are indeed too difficult to overcome but also reveals a new, unforeseen source of tension between certified public accountants and cooperators.

The study calls for further research into the so-far-overlooked relationships between accounting as a profession and cooperatives. It also proposes to extend the usage of ANT in accounting research to the study of accounting as a profession.

While ANT-inspired accounting research has to date shown a dominant interest in successful translation processes, the present study looks at an unsuccessful translation stage.

This paper aims to develop a managerial style typology relevant to kibbutz industry analysis and applicable to all cooperative organizations.

This study applied qualitative methods to evaluate the organizational biographies of Factories five factories, using open interviews and document analysis.

The findings show that before privatization took place, these industries were managed according to socialistic democratic principles. Once they became global and capitalistic, some kibbutz industries adopted a business cooperative style that combines features of capitalism and socialism, while others underwent a crisis and opted for a stricter and more bureaucratic managerial style.

This research is based on five case studies; further research is recommended to establish the current typology.

This study shows very clearly that the cooperative business style can be offered for businesses previously operated according to socialistic principles.

This study augments current literature by elucidating the speed with which business activity is conducted according to cooperative principles. It presents a typology relevant to kibbutz industry and cooperative organizations alike, addressing the cooperative managerial, cooperative business and bureaucratic styles, enabling maintenance of normative management that adapts itself to global and capitalistic environments.

This study aims to examine the housing cooperative practices employed in the Palestinian territories in the second half of the twentieth century and across diverse socio-political circumstances. This approach has been implemented to fulfil the housing needs of Palestinian society. Tracing this movement reveals an intensification of the housing cooperative approach between the years 1958 and 2008. However, in the years since, this practice has declined considerably.

This study discusses and analyses the housing cooperative practices adopted by the Palestinian community after 1956. It explores the stages, principles and concerns that characterise this practice, whether it is an approach that continues to meet a share of the demand for housing people in Palestine and how this practice can continue and receive wider support and recognition. The results of this study could aid in providing a diagnostic database, which in turn might provide a needed boost to the housing cooperative movement in the Palestinian territories.

The phenomenon of globalization is a popular and controversial issue that has many facets. According to Lee and Vivarelli 2006), most conversations around globalization tend to describe it in terms of increase in trade and liberalization policies and reduction in transportation costs and technology transfer. Heine and Thakur (2011) opine on globalization as follows:

Many regard globalization as both a desirable and an irreversible engine of commerce that will underpin growing prosperity and a higher standard of living throughout the world. Others recoil from it as the soft underbelly of corporate imperialism that plunders and profiteers on the basis of unrestrained consumerism. (p. 2)

Many regard globalization as both a desirable and an irreversible engine of commerce that will underpin growing prosperity and a higher standard of living throughout the world. Others recoil from it as the soft underbelly of corporate imperialism that plunders and profiteers on the basis of unrestrained consumerism. (p. 2)

The Brundtland Report (1987) was put together in response to agitations over such loses/discontents. This report gave birth to what unarguably is the most popular concept in sustainable development. The Report features the integration of the concerns about strands of development as experienced and as projected across divides, as well as concerns about their interrelationship, and effects on people and the environment. It seeks to reconcile the future with current developments. The recommendations of the report in the end materialized into the millennium development goals (MDGs) in January 2000, which in turn metamorphosed into the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in January 2016. The bulk of the SDGs are to be achieved in the global-south as countries within this categorization including Nigeria have more to do within their territories in order to ensure its actualization. One of the major challenges facing the SDGs in Nigeria is institutionalizing mobilization for the actualization of the goals. Against this backdrop, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) was launched to bring on board academic institutions, civil societies, non-governmental organizations, and businesses, and mobilize their activities into fewer but more efficient units.

This chapter contextually explores the purpose and roles of the SDSN in Nigeria, and conceptualizes how it will play out for both sustainable development and qualitative participation in globalization. It identified and explored the interface between the three variables of universities: cooperativism, cooperatives, cooperation, and solidarity economics; communities as integral to the actualization of the SDGs; and proportionate participation in globalization. Deficiencies were identified, and remedial actions proffered.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the Dutch cooperative Rabobank to understand how the structure of an organisation determines how individual employees validate norms within that organisation.

Data over an approximately 10-year period starting 25 years ago are analysed, and the value of relating a historical analysis and narrative approach to ethical and institutional theories in economics and management science is demonstrated.

Regulation in the banking sector appears to have a strong normative aspect. The choice between state and private ownership is based on ideology. The author argues that the private ownership model was based primarily on an ideology surrounding economic efficiency, but that in fact there are other logics that also promote economic development. This contributes to the understanding of the interaction between sector standards, organisational structures and the values of organisations and individual employees. The structure of an organisation enables key employees to deviate slightly from the organisation’s prevailing norms in response to pressures from the wider environment, and those individuals thereby become symbols of that organisation.

The perspective on management history put forward in this paper enables assessing the distinction between normative notions in institutional environments and the organisation as a whole as represented in its governance structure and narratives that key employees disseminate about the organisation. This in turn helps us to understand the interaction between sector standards, organisational characteristics and values represented by individual employees. The author reveals the strong normative impact of banking regulation in line with an older ideological model focused on economic efficiency rather than market logics and the interests of society.