Basic information about different kinds of WSDEs and how they handle common situations?

I often mention WSDEs in conversations around the internet in an attempt to try to spread awareness. Not unexpectedly, I often get responses from people who are skeptical that WSDEs can exist, can be competitive, or can handle basic issues like dealing with initial investment, handling different levels of skill or experience between workers, resolve conflicts, or effectively make decisions. In your various programs you often mention papers, studies, websites, and such that speak to these issues. Would you be willing to provide some links that discuss these and go into examples of how WSDEs might handle them, in a manner accessible to a layperson? I'd love to be able to use them to continue discussions, alleviate people's concerns about WSDEs, and demonstrate that there really are alternatives to capitalistic enterprises that people have thought through and that exist in the real world. Thanks in advance!

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Many, many studies exist of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain that has handled and often solved many of these questions about worker coops. Likewise such studies exist around the huge worker coop sector of the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. A contemporary business school professor (At Leeds University in the UK) named Virgie Perotin published excellent research on the problems and performances of contemporary worker coops. In the US, the US Federation of Worker Coops provides materials as well. These are starting points for interested folks to learn a great deal in the way of answers to such questions as you raise.


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  • Richard Wolff
    responded with submitted 2017-03-18 15:00:59 -0400
  • Brian Kendall
    published this page in Ask Prof. Wolff 2017-03-17 16:29:11 -0400

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