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Mondragon Discussion

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Re: Mondragon: Re: Mondragon

Title: Re: Mondragon: Re: Mondragon
 
Dear Race, Chris and mondragon@cog:
Lots of, uh, challenging short-term deadlines in Mondragon.  Lean production, you know.  Hope to add my two cents to the discussion when things slow down a bit at the end of the month or in August.  I was just scratching out a handful of "key" factors I think have been in play in Mondragon in recent years and the list quickly grew to a dozen or fifteen.  Reminds me of the comment made by a Canadian who visited the co-ops a year or so ago.  She said, "Whenever we ask you a question about Mondragon, your first response is:  'It's complicated' or  'Yes and no'  or   'It depends.' "   
 
Regards,
Fred
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Hsq95@aol.com
To: mondragon@cog.kent.edu
Cc: lr@ownershipassociates.com ; ff@ownershipassociates.com
Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 1:04 AM
Subject: Re: Mondragon: Re: Mondragon

Race -

I believe that through past correspondence you have acknowledged an acquaintance with my partner Fred Freundlich who teaches on the faculty of Mondragon University.  He and his colleague Luxio Ugarte have a long standing theoretical and practical interest in the democratization issues you describe as they are being played out in Mondragon.  Those questions are also a major focus of our work here at Ownership Associates in ESOP and cooperative companies that are our clients.

If you aren't in touch with Fred and Luxio on these topics, you may want to consider doing so (ff@ownershipassociates.com).  You can see for yourself if our work at Ownership Associates has anything to contribute to these questions.  My partner Loren Rodgers who takes the lead on our Ownership Culture Survey (OCS) work and other responsibilities is nearly finished with a re-tooling of our web page that will provide easier access to people who wish to make use of our work.  This note will hopefully spur him on to get the revised web page done in the coming week. 

Loren will be presenting on some of that work at the Eastern States Worker Cooperative Conference along with Tim Huet and others July 10-21 at the University of Maryland.  I will unfortunately be tied up at a competing conference in Philadelphia most of that weekend on behalf of the Mondragon inspired Sweat X project.  I may be in there that Friday night.  Are you planning to attend?

Finally, in my opinion Tim Huet and his colleagues in the Bay area have gone further than anyone else in this country in digging in to the details of how to make Mondragon style cooperative structures work.  As far as the gray hairs go though David Ellerman, Robert Oakeshott and probably yourself still set the standard.

Chris Mackin
www.ownershipassociates.com

Dear Fred

Thanks for your message. I'll look forward to your Luther-like nailing up on the Portalon of your fifteen or so propositions of Mondragonian ambiguity in August or sooner. Meanwhile, as you will see from my reponses to Chris Macken and Shann Turnbull, one aspect of the mission of COG's Mondragon page seems to me to be to encourage as many industrial relations, human resource management and industrial democracy scholars and practitioners as possible to apply their minds to the question of how the excellence of corporate governance in the Mondragon mould can be replicated at the shopfloor level, and it is very much my hope that people on the COHG page list who know of prospective sources of advice will alert them to the discussion. Correspondingly, there is a need for respondents within the co-operatives and I wonder if you have any views as to how the interest of prospective candidates can be engaged? Best wishes, Race
--


Dr Race Mathews,
Senior Research Fellow,
Government and Governance Unit,
Faculty of Business and Economics
Monash University.

Postal Address:
123 Alexandra Avenue,
South Yarra, Vic, 3141,
Australia.

Phone/Fax: (03) 9826 0104.