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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the conjecture that worker cooperatives (firms that practice participatory management and share profits broadly) suffer a competitive disadvantage relative to conventional firms is not supported by existing empirical research. It also considers alternative explanations for why such cooperatives are rare.

Historical analysis, literature survey, and survival analysis.

Studies of worker cooperatives in a variety of national settings indicate their failure rate is lower than conventional firms at least in the short and medium term. This contradicts the proposition that they are rare because they suffer a competitive disadvantage and focuses attention instead on their low formation rate.

The “liability of newness,” wealth and credit constraints, entrepreneurial rents, and collective action problems are cited as important barriers for the creation of worker cooperatives de novo, but these factors should be greatly reduced for those created through the conversion of an existing firm. Paradoxically, the overwhelming majority of cooperatives are created from scratch, and hence this explanation remains incomplete.

Existing policies incentivizing the creation of worker cooperatives, and current initiatives to promote them, do not encourage the creation of inferior economic institutions.

This paper contradicts the widely held belief that the distinctive features of worker cooperatives (participatory management and broadly shared profit) place them at a competitive disadvantage in a market economy. It also provides insight into why cooperatives are rare by challenging explanations based in presumed inefficiencies and focusing attention instead on barriers to creation.

This chapter examines the importance of stakeholder relationships to merger and acquisition (M&A) processes, using a case study of the AUD11 billion mega-merger in 2017 between Australian gaming groups Tabcorp and Tatts. The case study approach is adopted to consider the relevance of stakeholder management to the merger process from deal announcement to completion using documentary and semi-structured interview data. It is found that by managing critical stakeholder relationships through anticipating, pre-empting and negotiating potentially deal-breaking stakeholder conflicts, the merging parties ultimately won support for the deal from nearly all key stakeholders, thus ensuring its completion. The merger process both affected stakeholders and was in no small part affected by various stakeholder groups.

The chapter argues the need for a dynamic and dialectic understanding of how M&A processes relate to stakeholders. It offers deeper insight into how stakeholder theory can be used to enrich understanding of the broader economic, social and political implications of M&A, which enables researchers and practitioners to understand M&A outcomes for all stakeholders. The findings expand on the benefits of stakeholder analysis in relation to how stakeholders both affect and are affected by M&A processes, challenging the view that stakeholder relationships are unidirectional, static, or linear but evolve in complex patterns and along interconnected dimensions between and among stakeholder groups. This approach facilitates historical analysis, forward assessment, future planning and proactive responding, both for academics in devising theories and explanations, and for practitioners in considering, designing and implementing M&A strategies.

Neoclassic economics is a thing of considerable beauty. It yet finds an increasing tendency on the part of those trained in its discipline to rebel from its neatly fitted abstractions and intriguing diagrams. The rebellion stems from two sources. Veblen's sweeping attacks upon its postulates¹⁶ shock its theoretical foundations. The rapid changes in the industrial and business world discredited it on another front by bringing into increasingly sharp relief the divergence between the institutional assumptions of the orthodox theory and the conditions actually obtaining. The giant corporation, overhead costs, and the necessity for maintenance of volume, industrial concentration, the trade association, a widening spread among income classes, advertising, the growing inability of the consumer to gauge quality, the resort to reorganization instead of the “going out of business” of the long-run analyses – what place could the orthodox theory give to these important characteristics of the existing business economy?

Money is not often conceptualised as an object of protest or a tool for constructing alternative communities, economies and societies. Yet from the original utopian socialists Owen and Proudhon to contemporary alternative currency networks people have attempted to construct networks using new forms of subaltern money as a tool for building a more liberated economy and society. This chapter reviews the successes and failures of utopian money networks, arguing that although empirical success is ephemeral, the need to localise economies as a response to dangerous climate change might mean that their long-term future is brighter.