Paul Thompson
All firms are co-operatives? That can’t be right…
When I first started studying co-operatives as a graduate student, the first article I read was a piece provocatively titled “All firms are cooperatives – and so are governments.” Its author, Yale law professor Henry Hansmann, claimed exactly what you would expect from the title: that investor-owned businesses were no different in their structure than co-operatives. Continue reading
Markus Hanisch
The Centre’s second annual MacPherson Talk featured Dr. Markus Hanisch, managing director of the Institute for Research on Co-operatives at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Hanisch’s presentation — “Changing Governance in European Co-operatives: Simply Shifting or Losing Control?” — outlined a series of innovations occurring in European co-operative governance and the impact of these changes on co-operative performance. Based on data from 571 farmer co-operatives in the European Union, Hanisch concluded that co-operatives that have implemented certain governance innovations — professionalising and allowing outsiders to join their boards of directors, recruiting larger boards, and creating a governance model in which the co-op acts as a holding structure — have improved their performance. The research also notes, however, that these shifts towards corporate governance structures may affect member control. Continue reading