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COG
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Mondragon Discussion |
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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] Mondragon: Mondragon papers
Race Your paper at http://cog.kent.edu/lib/MatthewsMondragonDraft.htm on "Mondragon: Past Performance and Future Potential" extends the time period covered by my paper in the COG library. Refer to 'Innovations in Corporate Governance: The Mondragón Experience', Corporate Governance: An International Review, 3:3, 167-180, July, 1995, Blackwell, Oxford. Full text at http://cog.kent.edu/lib/Turnbull6.htm. Your paper goes further back in history and fills in recent events while my paper complements yours by providing more details and identifying the six lessons that Mondragon provided to me at the time of writing, namely: 1. 'Entrepreneurship has not only been successfully institutionalised and socialized in Mondragón; it has been dramatically improved' 2. 'the cooperatives are more efficient than many private enterprises' 3. introduced a number of social inventions 4. represents a system of social and political governance which is different from either socialism or capitalism 5. economic transactions are not governed just by markets and hierarchies but also by 'personal relationships' and 'associations' 6. economic growth was achieved without incurring the cost of servicing external equity or debt Since writing my Mondragon paper in 1995 and as a result of my PhD research I have discovered a number of additional profound insights that are presented in my paper ‘Design criteria for a global brain’, The First Global Brain Workshop (Gbrain O), Vrije Universiteit Brussei, Brussels, Belguim, Thursday, July 5, 2001. <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=283715> Video of presentation linked to http://www.comdig.de/Conf/GB0/pr010705327.html In short Mondragon provides the most outstanding example of the latest fad in management described as "network governance". But the form of networks it has developed follows the architecture used by nature to build and manage complexity. In other words Mondragon illustrates an "ecological" form of organisational architecture. I have used Mondragon as a case study in a public policy booklet I have just finished that is being published in London next month on "A NEW WAY TO GOVERN: Organisations and society after Enron". Electronic review copies of this booklet can be provided y myself on request and an academic version will soon be available with my other writings at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=26239 I have also used Mondragon as a case study for applying the science of corporate governance in another refereed paper that I have just finalised and sent today on ‘The science of corporate governance’ to be also published in Corporate Governance: An International Review, 10:4, September, 2002. In regards to your paper I do not think it is appropriate in your opening paragraph to state that it "provides an object lesson in the use of employee ownership..." as Mondragon employees may control but not own. Employees do not have property rights subject to their individual or even collective discretion to liquidate, unless a firm elects to exit the system as some have done. I do not accept the reported rhetoric of the MCC President, Javier Mongelos who you quote as saying "The workers own these cooperatives...". Maybe there is a problem in translating the word he used to English as differences in the concepts of ownership and control can be very slippery and are also very important. Mondragon illustrates common ownership that may include stakeholders who are NOT employees. However, stakeholder involvement is not inclusive and so Mondragon, as currently organised, does not provide a model for Demoratising the Wealth of Nations. The full text of my book with this title is also in the COG library at http://cog.kent.edu/lib/TurnbullBook/TurnbullBook.htm I would be interested to learn if the MCC has allowed any of its enterprises to directly compete with each other and if so how this is managed. Do you have any info in this regard? Shann Turnbull Ph.D.
P.O. Box 266 Woollahra, Sydney, Australia, 1350
Ph: +612 9328 7466 office; +612 9327 8487 home; Fax: +612 9327 1497;
Life long E-mail: sturnbull@mba1963.hbs.edu Alternate:sturnbull@optusnet.com.au
with other papers & book at http://cog.kent.edu/library.html
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