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Re: Mondragon: Re: Mondragon
Title: Re: Mondragon: Re: Mondragon
Dear Race
and Colleagues,
The question
of democratic shop floor management is clearly very important but let
me raise two other issues.
- As we watch the corporate global
economy gathering strength and momentum, Mondragon (and co-operatives
around the world) needs to ask what is the co-operative alternative.
Can Mondragon continue indefinitely with co-operative democracy for
the Basques but non-co-operative ventures outside the Basque Country?
Can any regional or national co-operative business or set of
businesses compete with no transnational linkages? What form can
these linkages take that is consistent with co-operative values and
principles? What is a "co-operative joint venture"?
A "co-operative strategic alliance?" An
"international co-operative merger"? How will
co-operatives in Northern Italy link co-operatively to Mondragon and
to our consumer co-operatives in lets say North
America?
I have been
trying to interest the MCC in a "joint venture, and while the
door has not yet closed (one way or the other) it is not an area where
much thought has been given. I would like to see this come up
for discussion as well.
- How do the enormous number of
'consumer' based co-operatives begin to convert to stakeholder
co-operatives (like Eroski) that reflect the mutual interests of
consumers and workers? Who is studying attempts to do this?
Legislation that allows it?
I have
started a more lengthy response to your paper Race but I must
admit it is a slow process taking the back seat to more mundane
concerns. Yet one day it will arrive on the list
serve.
Tom
Webb
----- Original Message -----
From: RaceM
To: mondragon@cog.kent.edu
Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 9:13 AM
Subject: 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.
Dear Tom
Thanks for your message and the
foreshadowed response to the exposure draft of my paper for COG's
Washington conference. Meanwhile, a correction is needed to the draft,
in as much as, due to a misunderstanding on my part of a conversation
with Mikel Lezamiz last year in Mondragon, the paper states that
"One outcome was a heightened recognition
that 'open book management' - the making available to members of
extensive financial and statistical data on the performance of their
co-operatives - is likely to be ineffectual, and perhaps
counter-productive, in the absence of training programs to equip the
intended recipients with the skills to properly interpret and make use
of it. The remedy in part has been seen to be the introduction of new
courses for skilling, confidence-building and consciousness-raising
that are being introduced progressively throughout the co-operatives,
under the guidance of their sociologist author, Lezamiz". This
statement is incorrect, in that the courses to which Mikel was
referring were for managers rather than for shopfloor members as
I had understood him to say. Needless to say, in my view the
discrepancy simply serves to highlight a significant and
uncharacteristic insufficiency of attention on the part of the
co-operatives to an issue that is crucial for their future well-being,
and my priority - for what it is worth - is soliciting dialogue and
expert input on how it can be rectified or alleviated. However, none
of this should be read as in any way devaluing the issue of
restructuring retail co-operatives along the multi-stakeholder lines
exemplified by Eroske to which you so rightly draw attention, and I
very much hope that on it too a profitable exchange of information and
opinion can occur.
As to your query
" Can Mondragon continue
indefinitely with co-operative democracy for the Basques but
non-co-operative ventures outside the Basque Country?", Mikel's
advice to me last year was that a MCC working party including its now
CEO had recommended introducing participatory arrangements into the
overseas subsidiaries on a culturally sensitive case-by-case basis;
that the recommendation had been adopted by the MCC; and that the
working party had been re-tasked to oversight its
implementation. Best wishes, Race
Mathews
--
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.
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