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The aim was to prove the efficacy of the five cooperative learning elements applied in English classrooms and to demonstrate how effective they were to develop social skills in students.

The qualitative approach allowed to analyse the data in order to determine the benefits of using these elements which help students to create a good rapport among them and do more productive activities to retain the knowledge. The instruments were Cooperative Learning Activity Planning Template that included 20 major steps in designing and assessing a cooperative learning activity designed by Susan Johnston. Additionally, rubrics that included the cooperative learning elements: face-to-face (promotive) interaction, positive interdependence, individual accountability, group processing and collaborative skills were necessary to assess students' accomplished tasks.

Furthermore, when students played different roles, they attained their goal and did cooperative tasks more productively. All mentioned above enables Ecuadorian educational institutions to include better teaching methods and provokes consciousness of students' accomplishment towards their goals.

In the beginning, some constraints were presented; students did not have a clear idea about the main difference between group work and cooperative work. However, once they were aware of cooperative learning elements, they did incorporate them appropriately in each assigned activity which allowed them to obtain better results. Another limitation referred to master students who did not always provide learners with constant monitoring when they were working on cooperative activities; they simply believed that strong students could help the rest in the group if there was any inconvenience with the task, taking this situation for granted.

The originality of this study is reflected in the results obtained in the final product students presented since they used the elements in a more effective way to build social skills and achieve higher grades.

Precarious work, characterized by low wages, unpredictable schedules and hours, physical hazards, and stressful psychosocial conditions, is a significant problem in the twenty-first century US economy. It most harshly affects women, racial/ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Caring labor jobs often involve precarious work and home health aide jobs are among the most precarious of these. With an ageing population creating high demand and a decline in the number of available workers, a societal crisis looms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a business form that could positively impact the home care work environment.

This paper reviews previous research to call for closer examination of worker cooperatives as a means to reduce precarious work among home health care workers.

Worker cooperatives provide opportunities for economic empowerment for impoverished and marginalized workers. Cooperative Home Care Associates, a worker cooperative in the home care industry, reports better outcomes to workers than similar conventionally governed businesses.

This paper reviews results of a study comparing three organizational forms in the home health industry. Although there are relatively few worker cooperatives in the USA, future research should investigate this structure both where there is a low-wage labor force, and in general.

Better outcomes for employees in the worker cooperative suggest that this is a viable business form for workers in precarious work environments.

The paper highlights the features of an organizational form that could help alleviate social ills caused by precarious work.

This paper considers the structure and function of a business form little studied in the management discipline. Based on their unique features and possibilities, worker cooperatives should be of interest to equality, diversity, and inclusion scholars; and to strategy, organizational behavior, and entrepreneurship scholars.

Social economy employees focus on personal fulfillment and social good rather than economic gains. They prefer to work in a sector that promotes satisfaction and makes them feel worthy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate employees’ motivations to engage in the social economy sector, especially in a period of financial downturn in Greece. Furthermore, the impact of specific demographic characteristics on employees’ work motivation is examined.

The research participants included 200 employees of worker cooperatives and social cooperative enterprises. A survey was conducted by collecting primary data and using a close-ended type questionnaire.

According to the findings, intrinsic forces motivate the employees to a greater extent toward social economy sector than economic ones. However, the replacement of the profit motivation from the main concern, it does not mean that the employees are not interested in financials. The survey also indicated that the most important barrier for starting to work in the social economy sector is the difficulty in finding partners. Finally, the findings showed that demographic characteristics partially influence work motivations of Greek employees on the social economy sector.

The results of this study may interest employers in finding new ways to motivate employees toward social economy sector under economic crisis conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which social cooperatives in Italy followed and managed to preserve their core values and principles while withstanding multiple pressures during the great recession. Attention is paid to two key issues. First, the concept of political agency is used to understand whether social cooperatives have been sensitive and committed to their role as key political players in the sustainable development of the community in which they operate. A further issue addressed is the impact of the post-2008 crisis on the quality of work and employment in social cooperatives.

This paper adopts a mixed-method social research approach. It integrates quantitative analysis of administrative data on business life cycle drawn from the Italian business registers with empirical evidence collected via in-depth interviews and focus groups on a sample of managers of social cooperatives and representatives of social cooperative associations and consortia.

Findings suggest that the great recession and welfare state retrenchment have worsened the quality of work and employment. Nonetheless, evidence produced through qualitative research also shows that social cooperatives have proved to be well suited to displaying political agency and acting as a key political player at local level.

Results of field research are not generalizable.

Comparatively higher resilience of cooperatives, which is very much attributable to their specific rationale and mission, may come at a cost. The literature has largely missed investigating this cost, which can also be measured in terms of consistency with core values. Indeed, the sustainability of cooperatives relates to economic indicators, such as employment and economic performance, but also to the social, cultural and political dimension of the enterprise. In this regard, this paper investigates the extent to which, during the post-2008 crisis, cooperative enterprises managed to preserve the quality of work and employment and play a political role in the welfare system.

The aim of this article was to analyze how the presence of the elements that constitute organizational links are related to sensemaking in a cooperative system of medical work.

A content analysis was conducted following interviews with the managers of the cooperative, which is a member of the Brazilian cooperative system and one of the largest in the world. This analysis enabled the systematization of the categories that were identified through the coding of responses, aided by Atlas.ti 8.0 software.

After the analysis, it was possible to resize the constitutive elements identified in the specialized literature into three categories: identification, cooperation and recognition. The proposed resizing does not preclude the presence of the constitutive elements identified in the analysis, but it evidences the presence of these elements in a contextualized manner, suggesting a model of an organic organizational link that is dependent on the relationship between subject–object (organization), in which the different perceptions of meanings affect identification, and this can strengthen or weaken the link in a constant process of resignification.

With regard to its theoretical relevance, the work helps to bring concepts related to organizational links and sensemaking closer together as a process in the realm of intersubjectivity. This provides evidence of the presence of constituent elements of ties in a contextualized manner, demonstrating that the interpretation of managers aids sensemaking in a process of circularity and resignification.

This study aims to examine the changes in cooperative community and kibbutz industry that did not undergo privatization.

This research was based on the case study method, combined with ethnographic interviews and document analysis.

The findings showed that the industry was highly successful economically, enabling the management to strengthen its authority without sharing information. The decision-making process, thus, became authoritarian, while the community's democratic mechanism was only nominal. This change was also accomplished by cultural transition from cooperative toward more capitalistic values. Management preferred to hire professional workers from the outside without any preference for kibbutz members, causing ethical dilemmas for certain elderly kibbutz members, who felt that the factory had abandoned socialistic ideas.

This research was conducted only on one kibbutz industry; further research is recommended.

Management at cooperative organizations needs to realize that in a capitalistic environment, adaptation can cause the organization to lose its cooperative features. To prevent a cultural shift toward capitalistic values, managers need to be socialized and workers persuaded of the importance of cooperative values.

The study is innovative for its focus on loss of cooperative community and managerial style that has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature. This research sheds light on organizational conditions that can cause cooperative communities to lose their democratic and socialistic attributes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism and boundary conditions in the relationship between differential leadership and team decision-making effectiveness.

A total of 366 valid questionnaires were received from employees of high-tech enterprises in China, regression-based moderation and bootstrapping analyses were adapted to analyze data and test hypotheses by using the PROCESS syntax in SPSS software.

Differential leadership can positively contribute to team decision-making effectiveness, and thriving at work mediates the relationship between the two, and cooperative goal perception plays a moderating role in the relationship between thriving at work and team decision-making effectiveness and cooperative goal perception moderate the mediating effect of thriving at work between differential leadership and team decision-making effectiveness.

The findings suggest that managers need to focus on leadership style to promote improved team decision-making effectiveness by enhancing thriving at work and cooperative goal perception.

Overall, this study is based on the conservation of resources theory to uncover the “black box” between differential leadership and team decision-making effectiveness and to highlight the important role of thriving at work and cooperative goal perception.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss researcher subjectivity in social entrepreneurship ethnographies. Previous research has highlighted a need for alternatives to the heroic representations of social entrepreneurship. Ethnographic methods have been mentioned as a relevant direction to create such emerging understandings.

This paper shows what followed from a decision of a researcher to do an ethnography of a co-working cooperative established for social innovation. Based on the notion of “working the hyphens” in previous research, further developed by other scholars as “working within hyphen-spaces”, the position of the researcher shifted during the research process between a distant outsider and an engaged insider. In addition, a new hyphen-space of hopefulness – hopelessness emerged based on fieldwork.

The shifting positions are manifested in the entanglement of stories of the researcher and the people met during the fieldwork in the hyphen-spaces of insiderness – outsiderness, engagement – distance and hopefulness – hopelessness. The stories reveal how for some the co-working space was a place for hope while for others it caused distress and even burnout.

The ethnographic understanding of social enterprises go beyond heroic representations, which affects how the phenomenon is represented in academic and public discussions.

This study concludes that despite its failure in the form of a bankruptcy, the co-working cooperative succeeded in enabling “social innovation” in the form of hope and personal development – also for the researcher.

This study contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature in showing how ethnographic fieldwork and acknowledging researcher subjectivity bring up alternative representations of social entrepreneurship. The entangled stories of participants and researchers can be a powerful way to reveal situated understandings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the conditions underpinning the cooperative relationships between family businesses. The role of trust is also explored, given the focus on informal conditions nested within the cooperation between firms.

A case study research method is adopted in this paper. This research is conducted within a cooperative association in Cyprus where 40 retail family businesses trade under the same brand.

The findings suggest that cooperation between family businesses emerges and unfolds as a result of the presence and interrelationships between a number of critical conditions: trust, altruism, collective thinking, stewardship, friendship, and family values congruence. The work illustrates that trust becomes a catalyst to the emergence and maintenance of cooperative relations between family businesses. Trust between family leaders is important in building altruism, collective thinking, and stewardship norms amongst them, and helps in sustaining the cooperation between their respective firms. At the same time, trust (stemming from past friendship and values congruence between diverse family leaders) becomes important in bringing family businesses to cooperate together at first instance. Further, the findings stress the role of critical events and self-interest in moderating the role and influence of trust on the cooperation between family businesses.

This paper contributes to the family business field through new knowledge on the relations between family businesses and the unique conditions that shape their long-term cooperation.

The objective of this study is two‐fold. First, it provides guidance to educators and trainers on establishing a cooperative learning environment. Second, it examines final‐year undergraduate accounting students' opinions on the effectiveness of a cooperative learning environment in delivering generic skills for their future professional accountancy careers. In particular, the study examines relative perceptions of effectiveness between students of differing academic abilities.

A questionnaire was administered to elicit students' views on whether they believed cooperative learning had enhanced their generic skills development. The data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics and Mann‐Whitney U tests of differences.

Students found the cooperative learning approach beneficial in developing their generic skills. Further, no significant differences were found between the perceptions of the less and more able students.

The study addresses perceptions of the benefits derived from cooperative learning rather than measuring benefits using an objective measure of achievement. Therefore, an interesting extension of this work would be to chart changes in personal development as a consequence of implementing cooperative learning over a number of years.

The findings provide some level of assurance for educators in accounting and other vocational disciplines that students of different academic abilities believe they have enhanced their generic skills as a result of engaging in cooperative learning.

This paper provides guidance to educators on establishing a cooperative learning environment and provides empirical evidence on its contribution to the enhancement of generic skills.