Search results

My interest in social economics was very much stimulated by Dr. George F. Rohrlich, in our years as colleagues at Temple University. More than once, our conversations on this and related topics have been interrupted by my comment (not, I must confess, without mischievious intent) that I really had no clear idea what social economics was. Not to be diverted by my grouchiness, George responded that, after all, the limits of social economics are yet to be discovered. Indeed they are, of course, and any living science or humane study is sure to have somewhat indefinite boundaries. To define is to delimit, and whatever may be defined without the least ambiguity or vagueness must surely be dead.

This paper formalizes the determination of effort in work teams as a social dilemma, adding a mutual-monitoring activity and reciprocity motivations to the formal model of effort provision in cooperatives. It turns out that the cooperative solution is viable in a work group in which the workers frame effort as a reciprocal gift, and if they do frame effort in this way in worker cooperatives, this could explain the observed tendency of cooperatives to attain higher productivity.

Reviews some recent neoclassical‐economic writing on equitable allocation of resources and inquires whether this approach to equity might lead to a case for a right to access, particularly with respect to medical care. The common logic of this literature is that equal access to all goods and services is fair, but inefficient, so that a fairness‐preserving shift to an efficient allocation could produce an allocation that is both efficient and fair. It seems, however, that this supports “rights to access” only where the person deprived of access would lack information necessary to determine whether compensation for the deprivation might be due. Medical care does seem to be a case in point.

Argues for a reorientation of economic theory around the concept of co‐operative production. Suggests that by definition, co‐operative production exists when different people take different, complementary roles in production. Argues that, while the proposed reorientation has clear roots in the ideas of Adam Smith, it also synthesizes several other key insights of the classical economists, and at the same time leads, by implication, both to the major topics of neoclassical economics and to some important topics of modern applied economics that are often treated in an ad hoc fashion, such as economies of agglomeration, dualism in development and X‐inefficiency.

We envision an enterprise owned by an association of its employees. The enterprise may employ nonmember as well as member labor. All are paid the same wage, but member-employees also accrue credit toward a pension as a benefit of their employment. Nonmember employees do not receive this benefit. Nonmember employees may be allowed to “buy in” as members for a share value that does not dilute the retirement fund, but only at the discretion of the existing members. As a consequence, the workers’ association is not strictly a cooperative, since membership is not “open.” One of the purposes of this inquiry, however, will be to determine under what circumstances the workers’ association will recruit new members.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

This volume of Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor-Managed Firms comprises nine original research chapters and a short comment.¹ The chapters cover a broad range of topics: from share ownership plan membership to determinants and performance outcomes of adoption of high performance work and pay practices, to changes in traditional participatory organizations. Geographically, the chapters span over a relatively wide range: from Northern Europe, a southeast European transition economy, Israel, Korea, Japan to an international corporation with operations in at least four continents.

Both the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism.

The proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus.

Workers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment.

In light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.