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This paper gives an account of the development and pioneering management practices of a community‐owned and managed agency, Walterton and Elgin Community Homes (WECH), locating these in the context of continuing concerns and emerging aspirations over the role of social housing, with developing UK national policy and a proposed statutory “Right to Transfer” for tenants.

This report provides a narrative of the recent development of social housing policy development and the evolving practice of WECH. This is the essential historical and social policy background to a recent study into the health and well‐being benefits of empowerment through community ownership of social housing. This first paper refers to and discusses the wider implications of the data collected during the well‐being research and literature review, indicating that the population of the WECH estates experience a sense of belonging, and of being involved, which contrasts markedly with statistics for comparable populations in comparable areas of deprivation. Further analysis of the key findings of the original study will be published in Part two.

The benefits of more community‐owned services include the more efficient and holistic management of properties. Community‐based, resident‐controlled housing associations offer a secure foundation for building in additional services as part of the continued drive to devolve public services to the local level, including hosting of a substantial range of community services, for example the reintegration of the Police into the community. The principle of community ownership of council estates is also valuable in its own right for informing the direction of housing management and policy and where to target effort. The experience and practice of WECH supports the proposition that community ownership of social housing may be an exceptionally effective means for improving and sustaining wellbeing in poor neighbourhoods.

This paper argues that Government policy should actively support mass mutualisation as a means for improving wellbeing on council/social housing estates and for empowering poorer communities to take greater responsibility for their welfare. Regardless of the extent of mutualisation, many of the practices involved are transferable to non‐mutual social landlords, and may be seen as markers of good practice for agencies intending to taken on social housing via transfer.

There is continued interest in the transfer of social housing stock to new provider agencies. WECH has been the only large‐scale statutory transfer until now of council housing in England and Wales to a mutual, community‐owned housing association. WECH's experience is especially relevant for evidencing the significant advantages governments could obtain through encouraging many more transfers of council estates to community housing associations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that may have contributed to different levels of very high-capacity network (VHCN) coverage, with a particular focus on the role of regulation and State aid.

A comparative empirical study based on multiple case studies was conducted in France, Portugal, Spain and the UK.

Although France, Portugal and Spain initially adopted similar regulatory strategies for VHCN deployment, the outcomes differed significantly. The UK, with a more demanding regulation, achieved a residual coverage. This study highlights the importance of the regulatory approach to VHCN access in balancing private and public investment and emphasizes the importance of State aid in the policy agenda for nationwide VHCN deployment projects.

Research on complex phenomena, such as the impact of regulation on investment or the effectiveness of State aid procedures, may focus on specific events to the detriment of others, which could bias the results.

The findings of this study provide insights for policymakers involved in State aid decisions and regulators by understanding the importance of timely State aid interventions, efficient governance and the impact of regulation on investment incentives.

This paper extends the literature on the impact of regulation on investment incentives and State aid as a tool to complement private investment for VHCN deployment through in-depth case studies.

This paper aims to examine the influence of neoliberalist deregulation on the rash of demutualisations of the 1990s. It explores the extent to which the demutualisation of two building societies – Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley – and their subsequent demise in the wake of the credit crunch exemplify key features of the neoliberalist experiment, with a particular focus on their post‐mutualisation business models.

The analysis draws on literature that examines the neoliberal development of the financial sector and examines the media coverage of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 to study the discursive and material conditions of possibility for the development and implosion of the business models used by Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley.

The paper argues that the demutualisation of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley was part of a broader neoliberal movement which had processes of financialisation at its centre. By converting into banks, former building societies gained greater access to wholesale borrowing, to new types of investors and to the unrestricted use of financial instruments such as securitisation. The collapse of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley is interpreted in the light of their access to these new sources of funding and their use of financial instruments which were either unavailable for, or antithetical to, the operation of mutual societies.

The paper comments on the contemporary features and current effects of the 2007/2008 crisis of liquidity, whose full long‐term consequences are uncertain. Further research and future events may offer confirmation or serve to qualify or correct its central argument. The intent of the paper is to provide a detailed analysis of the conditions and consequences of building society demutualisation in the context of the neoliberal expansion of the financial sector that resulted in a financial meltdown. It is hoped that this study will stimulate more critical analysis of the financial sector, and of the significance of financialisation more specifically.

The paper adopts an alternative perspective on the so‐called “subprime crisis”. The collapse of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley is understood in relation to the expansion, and subsequent crisis, of financialisation, in which financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were at its explosive centre, rather than to the expansion of subprime lending per se. Demutualisation is presented as a symptom of neoliberalism, a development that, in the UK, is seen to have contributed significantly to the financial meltdown.

This paper explores the contextual relevance of sharing economy for the organic food market in an emerging economy like India.

Case study approach was used to collect empirical data from different types of organic food markets.

Organic food farmers markets compared to online and health food stores tends to facilitate sharing economy more since it helps them to build value, scale and trust. By sharing resources, skills and spaces, organic farmers markets have increased organic food availability, reduced its cost of certification and operation besides managing consumer trust. Subjective influence through social media and offline interaction reduces information asymmetry at zero marginal cost. Organic food producers/retailers can get a competitive advantage by tapping underutilized assets to create value and opportunities besides overcoming their demand and supply constraints.

The research offers a fresh perspective to the organic food sector, particularly in emerging economies like India. It could assist all stakeholders to overcome the current demand and supply challenges faced in organic food markets.

This paper aims to analyze the development of European Deposit Insurance (DI) and assess the recent development at the EU level to establish a European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS) in the context of a more integrated financial framework: the Banking Union (BU).

The author uses literature review and empirical evidence to analyze the dynamic interaction among European governments in an effort to attract aggressive deposits with severe repercussion for financial stability.

The paper argues that a liquidity providing EDIS would render regulatory subsidy and rent-seeking behavior persisting by allowing national policies to be pursued with considerable discretionary power and in the context of increasing competition for deposits. This would run contrary to the BU objectives and constitute a major failure of the program.

The findings of the study can be helpful in understanding the DI policies pursued by European governments and their implications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines the interactions among European governments in pursuing DI policies and assesses the implications of EDIS.

Marketing scholars have devoted little attention to the study of practices which grant multiple lives to goods. However, these practices can considerably extend products lifecycles with far-reaching implications for traditional retailers and the economy. Accordingly, this paper aims to provide scales for perceived impact and motivations of goods multiple lives practices and to investigate the influence of impacts on motivations.

A qualitative phase (three discussion groups and 15 in-depth interviews) identified consumers’ motivations and perceived impacts of goods multiple lives practices. Two online surveys were then conducted on online panels, involving more than 2,200 consumers, to develop the measurement scales and test the structural model.

Results show that impacts measured only marginally influence economic motives but account significantly for a broad range of other motivations (ecological, protester and social contact motives).

The study design is cross-sectional, therefore lacking causality. Replication studies could cross-validate the findings by means of experimental research.

The findings may prove of specific interest to marketers and organizations in the goods multiple lives sector seeking to harness consumer interest in these types of practices for reasons above and beyond lone economic incentives.

This study is innovative in two regards: it explores a relatively under-theorized field in marketing, namely, goods multiple lives practices; and it proposes a challenging theoretical perspective which supposes that consumers’ perceived impact of their practices plays a significant role in motivating them to engage in practices of the like.

In the 1990s, European social democrats coalesced around a set of principles often referred to as the third way – characterised by prudent economic governance, a slimmer public sector, ‘productive’ welfare services and attraction to inward investment. Third way proponents perceived fairness as supporting opportunity rather than redistributing welfare. On the way to the late 2000s, their sense of direction was lost. The final phase, one might argue, ended with the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Henceforth, the challenge for the Left concerned how to define a social democracy with less revenue and limited scope for expanding public services, while reaching out to the so-called left-behinds through better jobs and a renewed sense of common purpose.

Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron represent two distinctly different attempts at forging a new way forward from the impasse. During Corbyn's tenure as a leader (2015–2020), Labour carved out space by moving leftwards on key economic policies while proffering communitarianism as the antidote to globalised capitalism. Across the English Channel, Macron's new party, La République En Marche, sought to generate a new form of politics that had clear similarities with the centrism of third way social democracy, supplemented by an emphasis on social dialogue and enhanced European integration as a strategy for harnessing globalisation.

Corbynism and Macronism represent two distinct attempts at centre-left renewal, both personalised yet evolving on the back of mass movements. This chapter summarises the trajectory of both in terms of ideological content and organisational change and asks what lessons they convey about the future of social democracy in the twenty-first century.

This paper aims to analyze the “crafts” of governance within social and solidarity economy (SSE) cultural organizations, considering formal and informal rules, to support their project of democratization of arts and culture and more generally of cultural democracy. The hypothesis is that it is through participatory and democratic governance that SSE can have a transformative role.

This paper builds upon a qualitative, multiple case study of three SSE organizations in the performing arts and audiovisual production in France. Although different in age, size and legal form, they all experiment a more participative governance system, not without tensions, to face deep institutional changes in their environment.

The results show that legal forms from the SSE are necessary safeguards but not sufficient to effectively implement a democratic governance beyond the “one member, one vote” principle. Democratic governance is supported by both formal and informal rules. By experimenting with innovative participative and democratic governance rules, these organizations contribute to the transformation of practices in the cultural field (democratization of art and culture) but also in society at large by fostering cultural democracy.

Building upon three case studies, this exploratory work stresses important issues that are worth to explore on a larger scale to understand by which levers SSE can play a transformative role in the cultural field.

This paper contributes to the literature on SSE and on governance by enlarging the analysis beyond the board of directors and the statutory rules. Applying the approach of collective action and reasonable values developed by Commons to SSE, it shows that participatory governance cannot be based on an ideal or a choice of preestablished values and principles but must leave room for creativity and representations of stakeholders not only to support transformation of practices within the cultural field but also externally by increasing cultural democracy.

The purpose of our article is to contribute to the further understanding of individual responses to pluralism, by studying in particular the role played by critiques and compromises in the formulation of such responses. Drawing on theoretical insights from the sociology of conventions, we look at the various modes of justification publicly advanced by French co-operators when engaging with co-operative principles. Our analysis allows us to identify three main instantiations, that is situated and flexible enactments, of these principles: pragmatic, reformist, and political. Our contribution to the understanding of pluralism and its instantiations by organizational members is threefold. First, in contrast with studies drawing on an institutional-logics perspective, our study shows that individual instantiations of pluralism rely not only on positive affirmations of logics but also on critical mobilizations of competing logics. Second, our study shows that pluralism can be understood not only as co-existing multiple logics, but also as different possible instantiations of the same logic, the ambiguity of which allows compromises to be settled with other logics. Third, we suggest that organizational members’ responses to pluralism often involve more than two logics, which are combined into a complex set of interdependent judgments. In addition, in relation to co-operative studies, our proposed typology provides a mapping that usefully extends the range of possibilities found in co-operators’ instantiations of co-operative principles, thus furthering our understanding of the diversity of the co-operative movement.

This paper reviews experience with credit union demutualisation to date in the light of increasing discussion about whether demutualisation is a likely (or inevitable) future stage in the evolutionary process. It is argued that the credit union industry faces an inherent demutualisation bias which emerges as the sector develops maturity. Contributing factors include the emergence of professional management pursuing personal objectives, together with the economic realities of technological change, financial liberalisation, increased competition, and prudential regulation based on minimum capital requirements. Demutualisation incentives may partially reflect the unsuitability of the mutual form of governance in larger, more sophisticated financial institutions, but there is also a significant risk of demutualisation based on wealth expropriation motives. Alternative policies and strategies which might avoid this demutualisation bias are examined.