Why? Are there lessons we need to carry forward when creating new ones?
For example getting funding to turn a business into a coop, let's say it's a one man owned business who is going to retire and has no family, so he offeres to sell it to the employees so they can turn it into a coop. Financially almost no investors would take that bet, the banks wouldn't really give a loan to 10+ people who make salaries, really the main way this could happen is if the owner took a hit and did something like a persona loan and let them pay him back from the profits over the course of 10 years.
I've also heard that there isn't much information on how to start or run one, like looking for books in the library can often fall short or you will only find something outdated. I think the lack of information is part of it as well as it's been so disincentivized for so long that most we can find are either run in a hippie commune style, or created by a small town government to provide services a corporation wouldn't (Best internet I've had was due to them having set up a coop), on top of that I can only think of one college that even teaches coop structure and that's Mondragon in spain[1] but on searching deep enough I also found U of Wisconsin[2] has something too, that's still not a lot.
[1] https://www.mondragon.edu/en/international-mobility/mondrago... [2] https://uwcc.wisc.edu/
I'm hoping the trend goes in a different direction for tech companies and they see that there's an alternative - but the fundamentals of co-operatives won't (and shouldn't!) change.
I think Main reason is that coops so do not fit Well in our profit maximizing Economy. We do produce profits but due to the Nature of our organization there is no incentive for Investors that seek high margins. ( In fact we dont allow external Capital in to remain in Control of our decisions). So linear growth it is.
I think a lot more growth than you Like is Made by exploitation of the workforce. Without doing that you have a Harder time prooving yourself in the Market.
Coops sometimes mitigate this disadvantages by networking with each other.
Regulatory capture hurts all new startups and is unlikely to be aimed specifically at coops
Can you provide concrete examples?
They'd much rather extend loans to traditional businesses with owners who are willing make cutthroat, unpopular decisions and fire employees if it's necessary to defend and preserve their capital.
I think you’d have to find examples of companies that only do #1 or only do #2 and look at their outcomes versus companies that do both.
My guess is the root cause of what you’ve observed is the distributed decision making and the attendant latency and diffusion of responsibility it brings.
You can kinda see a hint of this in the spelling of Toronto as Tkaronto. I don't think this benefits the list. It's a kind of meta work, a convenient distraction from doing something of value.
If you're a builder you'll preoccupy yourself with the thing you're building. If you're driving by an ideology, you'll spend most of your time there, and legal frameworks will be of secondary concern, a means to an end.
If you're one person building a thing that one person can build, that might be true.
If you're building a thing that needs or merely benefits from having more people doing the building, you almost certainly need to think about how to structure and coordinate what people do. That's true even if your decision is "no structure and no coordination".
Sometimes, that process will be implicit (and likely a more or less direct reflection of the personality of the initial builder). But for the most, once you start involving other people (or they involve themselves), organizational structure and behavior starts to become a thing you have to start paying attention to. Getting it wrong can destroy whatever you're trying to build.
Most skilled people will go were the money is, so coops are usually filled with low to mediocre workers.
"Produktivgenossenschaft als fortschrittsfähige Organisation: Theorie, Fallbeispiele, Handlungshilfen" by Burghard Flieger
I think, it's only available in German. The translated title would be:
"Workers cooperative as organization capable of progress: Theory, case studies, and procedural guidelines"
https://ownershipmatters.net/newsletter-item/tim-huet-arizme...
Another reason might be that if somebody is a co-owner with many others in an enterprise, he might not feel motivated to work.
In socialist countries the quality of most products and services was poor because no one cared and no one fel obligated to do a good job, since the enterprise was owned by all the people. Instead there were many small thefts from the workplace.
By comparison the decision-making in cooperatives is much better grounded in reality and has fewer disinterested and uninformed participants.
It's one person one vote applied to the corporation. In principle there's no reason why we should demand any less democracy inside corporations than what we demand in societies at large.
It's curious how many of these comments in this post could be reframed to be basically: "democracy can never work" or "democracy is clearly an inferior system to feudalism".
I guess it's all about inertia.
1. https://glineq.blogspot.com/2021/11/socialist-enterprise-pow...