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In its eighty‐sixth year, Harley‐Davidson, the only U.S.‐based motorcyclemanufacturer, is thriving in a fiercely competitive marketplace. Improved manufacturing techniques, employee involvement, and a key acquisition have helped spur the company's growth.

Prevailing concepts of corporate governance that are based on external shareholder interests have been challenged by a number of authors over the last three decades. The purpose of this paper is to outline the core assumptions of communitarian philosophy and values, together with the way writers imagine these might be enacted in a social enterprise context. These assumptions are then explored using two case studies.

The paper was conducted using participatory action research which involves parties examining current actions together and seeking to improve on them. The value of this approach is based on the plausible, authentic and critical insights it generates into management practice.

Case evidence suggests that companies are able to adopt and operate effectively while deploying communitarian values and that these values lead to alternative business objectives expressed through new forms of corporate governance. Nevertheless, the adopting of common language does not necessarily mean that social enterprises share a common philosophy.

The key contribution of this paper is to evaluate the institutionalisation of governance and consider the relationship between the form and substance of practice. By considering the link between words and actions, the paper concludes that the adoption of a governance framework, or particular language, matters less than the capacity of company members to participate in the development of governance norms that enable them to act congruently with their own beliefs and values.

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).

The Mondragon cooperatives are the most thoroughly studied and well-known example of worker cooperatives in the world. Yet while there has been much discussion and wide recognition of the empirical growth of the Mondragon co-ops, there is substantial confusion about the lessons we can draw from this case in thinking about workplace democracy more broadly.

The normative and empirical literature on Mondragon is carefully analyzed to draw out the main implications from this case study for the broader issue of workplace democracy.

I contend that Mondragon teaches us two main lessons. First, that workplace democracy can indeed operate in a way that is economically sustainable and socially superior to conventional firms. Second, Mondragon sheds light on the question of whether co-ops are doomed to degenerate.

This paper advances our understanding and conceptualization of workplace democracy.

This paper provides practitioners with an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the world’s most successful cooperative network.

This paper provides insight into the practical feasibility and normative desirability of alternative organizations of workplaces in the form of worker cooperatives.

This paper will be of particular interest to scholars and activists interested in democratic alternatives to conventional hierarchical firms by illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of the Mondragon cooperatives and drawing out the lessons that this specific yet influential example has for issues of workplace democracy more broadly.

The aim of this chapter is to ascertain the degree to which a training policy developed through corporate training centers is recognized as a source of competitive advantage for attracting, developing, and retaining valuable staff. The fieldwork is based on a survey of Human Resource (HR) managers from 66 cooperatives of the Spanish Mondragon cooperative group. The empirical test carried out confirms that Mondragon's training policy, backed up by its corporate training centers, is perceived by HR managers as a tool that provides advantages to attract, develop, and retain valuable human resources. The results also suggest that those advantages are more moderate than has been cited in classic literature on Mondragon. The results of this study can be helpful for the growing number of companies choosing to create and reinforce corporate training centers. The link between training policy and the perceived ability to attract and retain valuable employees showed in this case can also be helpful for other companies that, as Mondragon, face limitations in wage policy. This chapter contributes to the literature on the educational fabric of Mondragon adding updated empirical evidence and incorporating the point of view of HR managers of the group's cooperatives. With respect to the contribution of this chapter to the literature on training policy, the chapter's findings, in particular those regarding the effect of training on worker attraction and retention, add empirical evidence to the few studies on the subject.

Five years ago in a review of Jaroslav Vanek's The Labour‐Managed Economy published in this journal, the present writer ventured, inter alia, two general observations on the economics literature of the labour‐managed firm. First, “Vanek has contributed more words and analysis on this subject than the rest of the economics profession put together”. Secondly, “In spite of the increasing concern shown by the ‘men of deeds’ with participation, income sharing and producers' cooperatives over the last ten years the majority of the ‘men of words’ who have offered any advice have been of the sociological species… This reviewer is optimistic enough to hope that this is not because economists have nothing to contribute”. A review of three new books on the subject provides a timely opportunity to reassess these observations.

Perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) is a foundational concept in organization studies. The PEU typologies used in organizational research were developed using private sector managers. But, do public sector managers perceive the same uncertainty sources? We asked public sector managers in Hong Kong to identify and group uncertainty sources facing their organizations. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis yielded classes of uncertainty sources that differ from those developed using private sector managers.

A recent Fortune article went for the jugular, “Management consultants and business planners share a dirty little secret. Ninety percent of all strategies fail to get implemented.” The same article told the tale of a consultant who took a $3 billion company with no strategy and developed 200 separate Strategic Business Units. The issue is obvious. Given a company that couldn't execute one strategy, how do you suddenly take on 200 different ones — each requiring a different style, staff and skill?

The chapter proposes to investigate online reputation of hospitality brands and its measurements. Brand reputation is generally defined as an overall appraisal of a company by its stakeholders, which is the result of the company's past actions and predictions about the company's future (Ferguson, Deephouse, & Ferguson, 2000). Being viewed as the opinion shared among a group of stakeholders (Dowling, 2008), it plays an important role in the tourism industry. With the progress of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), reviews and user-generated contents of destinations and of hospitality companies together with the related emerging brand reputation can influence consumers' behaviors and choices. Brand reputation analysis could be more useful in the hospitality brand management when integrated with brand image and brand identity analysis, mainly because in tourism businesses and destinations, brands are typically affected by an inherent fragility determined by the service nature of products (Casarin, 1996). According to Biel (1991), the meanings that consumers assign to a brand are synthesized into brand associations formed by the components perceived to underlie the brand's image. As well as brand reputation, strong, positive and unique associations reinforce a brand and increase its equity that requires significant internal brand identity efforts, which should create a corresponding brand image through integration in overall marketing programmes (Keller, 2003). It makes sense to develop an analytical research approach that compares online brand reputation (OBR) with brand association matching as a measure of the alignment between brand identity and brand image in hospitality companies. This comparative analysis emerging from brand reputation, brand image and brand identity analysis can reveal divergent situations (i.e., high brand reputation and low brand association matching) and orient brand managers in reviewing online brand communication. Brand reputation and brand image analysis will be contextualized in an online community as a social setting that is considered to be a new type of market (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). We focus on hospitality online communities populated by consumers and other actors such as influencers and bloggers: their brand perception could be separately compared with brand identity that we will extract from company communications including presentational information and brand-related press releases found on websites, nonfinancial narrative from annual reports, and interviews with managers published in mainstream media sources. In our analysis we will focalize on a cluster of luxury hospitality companies integrating a netnographic and text-mining techniques. We will use both the techniques in order to (1) extract and study brand associations in terms of brand reputation, brand image, and brand identity; (2) develop indicators of brand reputation and brand association matching; and (3) discuss their utility in the management of the hospitality company brands.