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WORKERS’ COOPERATIVES AS A DRIVER OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY
Abstract
The article analyzes the adequacy of the cooperative form of socio-economic organization for the development of information technologies. Workers’ technological cooperatives were chosen as the subject of this study. The results of surveys of Stackoverflow.com site developers from 2015 to 2022 were used as the factual basis of the article. The sample size of respondents was 70 thousand developers, which made it possible to ensure the reliability of the author’s provisions and conclusions.The methodological basis of the work was the modern neoinstitutional theory, which gives two directions for research logic. Firstly, the authors were guided by the conceptual representation of classical institutionalism (not denied by the neoclassics) about the systemic quality of institutions, which, when applied to a cooperative organization, makes it possible to determine its exclusive properties relevant for integration into the information mainstream. And, secondly, the theoretical provisions of neo-institutionalism about the active role of individuals in the formation and development of institutions (in our case, cooperatives) were taken into account. Cooperators, seeking optimal forms and types of functioning of their enterprises, thereby create their adaptive potential to innovations in the field of information technology.To analyze the data of sociology, the authors used both general scientific and special research methods: static analysis and graphical visualization.The purpose of the article was to determine the compliance of cooperative associations with current trends in the promotion of information technology. IT cooperatives operate in a variety of types and industries: from web development to graphic design, web hosting, design and final production of complex technological products.Thus, the object of consideration of the authors of the article was the sphere of information and communication technologies, and the subject – cooperative processes in the IT sector.
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Programmers use various software development artifacts in their work, such as programming environments, design documents, and programming codes. These software artifacts can be studied and improved based on usability and User eXperience (UX) factors. In this work, we consider programmers to be a specific case of users and analyze different elements that influence their experience in this specific context. We conducted a systematic literature review of papers published over the last 10 years related to: (i) the definition of the Programmer eXperience (PX); (ii) the PX, UX, and usability factors regarding the programming environments, design documents, and programming codes; and (iii) sets of heuristics to evaluate the software development artifacts mentioned before. We analyzed 73 articles, and the results obtained show: (i) the important elements that influence the PX are the motivation of programmers and the choice of tools they use in their work, such as programming environments; (ii) most of the identified studies (59%) aimed to evaluate the influence of the PX, UX, and usability on programming environments; (iii) the majority of the studies (70%) used methods such as usability tests and/or heuristic evaluation methods; (iv) 4 sets of heuristics are used to evaluate software development artifacts in relation to programming environments, programming languages and application programming interfaces. The results suggest that further research in this area is necessary to better understand and evaluate the concept of the PX.
The global economy is affected by significant economic, technological and demographic changes that threaten to reduce decent work opportunities at a time when the demand for employment is growing, and economic inequalities are higher than ever. New technologies and automation are increasingly replacing human workers, and the sectors that are less likely to be affected by these phenomena and more likely to grow in the near future (e.g., like personal services) are also more prone to informal or non-standard forms of employment. In this context, significant attention is being paid to the social and solidarity economy (SSE) as a viable option to address some of these challenges. Indeed, while the SSE comprises a diverse and heterogeneous universe of organisational models and approaches, the main actors within the SSE share a set of common features that make them ideally suited to take on some of the key issues related to the future of work.
The article reviews the main theoretical arguments and empirical evidence on the features and role of SSE organisations, paying particular attention to their implications for the creation and preservation of decent work. The analysis shows that SSE organisations can indeed help create and preserve employment in traditional sectors and promote decent work by providing quality and stable jobs, facilitating women’s entry into the labour force, integrating disadvantaged workers and helping the transition from informal to formal employment. The article also argues that SSE organisations can help channel jobs in emerging sectors like the ‘silver economy’ that are at risk of non-standard forms of work, within entrepreneurial organisations that can provide more structure and security. This will be particularly important in the coming years, as a larger share of employment will come from the service sector (including in particular personal care and social services) and will be much less structured than in the past due to the rise of the gig economy. The article concludes with a review of the main policy implications, briefly describing the types of initiatives, both at the national and international levels, that could lend the SSE the support it needs in order to fulfil its potential and help improve the future of work.
The author evaluates the effects of democratic worker participation on the income distribution within firms. Wage inequality in French workers' cooperatives (called SCOPs) versus traditional firms is measured using the 2001-2012 panel DADS dataset which includes all French firms. The author finds significantly lower inequality in SCOPs, in line with the previous empirical literature. Going into more detail, it appears that inequality is reduced at the top of the distribution and specifically regarding qualification-based inequalities; the gender gap and the advantage of senior workers are not lower in SCOPs. These findings contribute to the literature on Labor-Managed Firms, as well as to the broader debate on rising wage inequality in developed countries.
Worker cooperatives are the least well-known part of the cooperative movement. Part of the reason is that the idea of a business run by its employees sounds unrealistic to many people. Yet there are thousands of worker cooperatives and related businesses around the world, including some very large firms. In the last two decades, the availability of extensive new data on worker cooperatives and other firms in several countries has made it possible to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the incidence and patterns of behaviour of worker cooperatives. The picture of worker cooperatives that is emerging from the research findings based on these data suggest that worker cooperatives are more “normal” firms than is often believed. For example, they can be found in a wide range of industries and seem to be larger, on average, than other firms. Importantly, this body of international research also sheds new light on issues that have been at the heart of the research debate on labour-managed firms, such as the objectives pursued by the firms and their capacity for growth. The paper examines the implications of the key international research findings of the last two decades for our understanding of why worker cooperatives are created, the objectives pursued by founding and subsequent members and the spill-over effects of their performance for the communities in which the firms are found. The paper argues that worker cooperatives, by providing institutions in which employees control most aspects of their job and firm strategy (including pay and employment trade-offs) internalise a number of externalities to the conventional operation of firms. They provide good, stable jobs in which employees’ potential and creativity can flourish. In addition to promoting economic democracy, worker cooperatives offer sustainable and local employment and are likely to have a number of positive effects on their communities’ economies, public finances and health.
This paper describes an exploratory study into organizational commitment in six workers' cooperatives in Scotland. Data was collected using questionnaires and semistructured interviews. The questionnaire was used to gather information about attitudes toward work, social attitudes, and demographic characteristics of the cooperatives' members. The interviews produced more detailed data about motivations for joining cooperatives, and about perceptions of the cooperative environment. The members of the cooperatives appeared to form a highly self-selected group, and produced scores on the scales of organizational commitment that were significantly higher than population norms. The data are interpreted as indicating a close match between the values and goals of the members of the cooperatives and what the cooperatives provided as work organizations. It is argued that this may account for the high organizational commitment scores, using a contingency model of organizational commitment.
The centrality of user-members in cooperatives and cooperatives' embeddedness in their community and in a global network influence positively their resilience in times of crisis, as illustrated by cases of cooperatives that acted entrepreneurially during the COVID-19 crisis. Cooperatives are hybrid organizations that maximize value, instead of profit. They are owned, governed, and controlled by their members. They are more resilient than the conventional enterprises in times of crisis, thanks to their peculiar governance characteristics that ensure member centrality. Next to member centrality, the embeddedness of cooperatives in their local environment and a global movement enhances mission centrality as well as trust and solidarity among their members, local communities, and other cooperatives.
Online programming courses have become widely available and host thousands of learners every year. In these courses, participants must solve programming exercises by submitting partial solutions and checking the outcome. The sequence of partial solutions submitted by a student constitutes the programming trajectory followed by the student.
In September 2015, the United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Transforming our world Agenda sets a course to eradicate poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all by 2030. Cooperatives are recognized as important partners to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because they promote democracy, enhance income, foster social inclusion, and care for the environment. The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) is playing a lead role in promoting the role of cooperatives in the implementation of the SDGs. Cooperatives across the Asia Pacific region are actively involved in the implementation of the SDGs and are gaining recognition for their work. The commitment by cooperatives cuts across all sectors—agriculture, banking and credit, consumer, health, and work. However, there are issues relating to monitoring targets and indicators, systematic data collection and reporting, increasing awareness about the SDGs, and building linkages across the spectrum of stakeholders.
The types of programming errors that novice programmers make and struggle to resolve have long been of interest to researchers. Various past studies have analyzed the frequency of compiler diagnostic messages. This information, however, does not have a direct correlation to the types of errors students make, due to the inaccuracy and imprecision of diagnostic messages. Furthermore, few attempts have been made to determine the severity of different kinds of errors in terms other than frequency of occurrence. Previously, we developed a method for meaningful categorization of errors, and produced a frequency distribution of these error categories; in this article, we extend the previous method to also make a determination of error difficulty, in order to give a better measurement of the overall severity of different kinds of errors.
An error category hierarchy was developed and validated, and errors in snapshots of students source code were categorized accordingly. The result is a frequency table of logical error categories rather than diagnostic messages. Resolution time for each of the analyzed errors was calculated, and the average resolution time for each category of error was determined; this defines an error difficulty score. The combination of frequency and difficulty allow us to identify the types of error that are most problematic for novice programmers.
The results show that ranking errors by severity—a product of frequency and difficulty—yields a significantly different ordering than ranking them by frequency alone, indicating that error frequency by itself may not be a suitable indicator for which errors are actually the most problematic for students.
There is evidence that worker cooperatives provide a greater stabilization of employment compared to capital-managed firms. While the reasons of this behaviour can be ascribed to their property and governance structure, less is known of the tools to put it into practice. I discuss two possible ways to guarantee employment insurance: by letting wages fluctuate, or by accumulating reinvested profits into an income stabilizing fund that copes with downturns without firing and without reducing wages. In this second case, I find out that asset locks play a wage smoothing role. This may explain the large share of profits that are reinvested in this indivisible and not appropriable fund. I provide evidence for this mechanism by means of original data at the firm level and of first-hand collected survey data at the individual level on risk perception in a sample of Italian cooperatives.
Solidarity economy (SE) is a set of theories and practices that engenders ethical economic relationships and new possibilities for democratic and transformative community development. SE advances democratic community development by providing an alternative to capitalist ideology from which the core goals of solidarity and agency can be imagined, identified, and realized. Further, it advances a set of concrete economic practices that enact these goals while sustaining people and the planet. Politically, SE is a movement that can build power within and across scales and win supportive policy and public resources. Using the development of SE in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, Massachusetts as examples, the article discusses the possibilities and challenges for SE projects to negotiate across differing values and politics, racial and class divides, and the challenge of accessing startup capital and building finance. SE suggests trajectories of “scaling up,” where local and regional efforts might be part of a strategy for deeper political-economic transformation. How SE expands depends on how actors in particular places and times take advantage of opportunities and overcome ideological, economic, and political challenges.
We study the impact of employer’s opportunism on wage rigidity in capitalist companies by arguing that the need to fix wages is crucially influenced by the asymmetric distribution of decision-making power and information in favor of the stronger contractual party — the employer, and against the weaker contractual party — employees. The capitalist entrepreneur can make decisions, whose negative consequences are borne by workers in terms of lower wages and more intense work pace. Excessive wage reductions in the face of negative exogenous shocks or too risky investment decisions represent the main instances of such opportunistic behavior. Fixed wages can represent workers’ best response to the emerging risk of the employer moral hazard, but this implies a heightened risk of layoffs since wages and employment levels cannot be fixed at the same time. Besides discussing piece rate contracts, profit-sharing and codetermination as counterexamples, we observe worker cooperatives which depart from the presence of contrasting interests and private information in the principal-agent framework. Indeed, several empirical studies have shown greater employment stability and wage flexibility in worker cooperatives vis-à-vis the capitalist firm.
Organizational democracy has become a key issue in current change-management programmes, such as restructuring, total quality management and Enterprise Resource Planning, and there has been a persistent quest for a post-Fordist model in recent times. The article emphasizes the need to study democratic processes per se, given that democracy faces significant odds vis-a-vis the larger context, even in those organizations that have been expressly initiated for democratic functioning. The contradictions with the context inevitably manifest themselves inside the organization as well. The present study makes a case for understanding organizational democracy as an evolving reality, based on participant observation of democratic functioning within a workers' cooperative over seven years.
Developing an alternative and more realistic modeling of the firm, the key point of this paper is that workers cooperatives represent a form of corporate governance, which is a subset of the participatory organizational form, that constitutes a competitive alternative to the typical relatively hierarchical and narrowly controlled firms. An important component of the cooperative advantage lies in its capacity to increase the quantity and quality of effort inputs into the ‘production process.’ However, to do so incurs economic costs. Thus, cooperatives can yield competitive outcomes without driving out of the market non-cooperative organizational forms. To some extent, whether cooperative or other participatory solutions are adopted depends upon the preferences of economic agents since cooperatives are shown to be competitive even in an extremely competitive environment. However, dominant or not, the cooperative solution can yield higher social-economic welfare levels to members.
Though it is routinely posited that organizations with different property rights will not exhibit the same responses to changes in their economic environment, compelling evidence of such behavior is difficult to find. The authors collected observations on two types of firms--conventional proprietorships and worker-owned cooperatives--operating in the same industry, in the same location, and at the same period of time. They compare the firms' reactions to changes in their input and output prices and ask whether their reactions are consistent with orthodox models of profit and dividend maximization. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.
Just as profit maximization has served as the reference case for understanding the behavior of conventional firms, so in the literature on worker-owned firms has the standard hypothesis been one of maximizing income per member. We estimate the parameters of a general objective function for worker cooperatives using observations collected by the authors on 11 plywood mills of the Pacific Northwest from 1968 to 1986. This objective function nests dividend maximization and employment maximization as special cases. We find that earnings, hours, and employment all enter the cooperatives′ objectives. The cooperatives place more weight on employment than on earnings. J. Comp. Econom., June 1993, 17(2), pp. 288-308. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405; and Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
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