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COG |
INTERNATIONAL MONDRAGON STUDIES ASSOCIATION | |
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views expressed on this listserv are those of the individuals posting the statement
and COORDINATOR: Race Mathews REGISTRATION: Register On-line Now. After
you have registered, and when you're ready to start sending messages; DISCUSSION: Browse Discussion to Date. This working group focuses on the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation (MCC) group of manufacturing, financial, retail, civil engineering, service and support co-operatives at Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. It has been established -- with the support of the Capital Ownership Group (COG) hosted at Kent State University with funding from the Ford Foundation -- to encourage informed debate, exchange of information and consciousness-raising among Mondragon scholars and within related academic disciplines and the wider community. Its premise is that Mondragon matters - that the co-operatives have much to teach the world, and much to gain from scholarly analysis and free-ranging discussion of their experience, attributes and activities. There is a further agenda, in that it is very much to be hoped that the site will give rise to a long-overdue International Mondragon Studies Association. The site has been titled, on an interim basis, the International Mondragon Studies Association site, in the hope of thereby making the association the more likely to happen. My assumption of the role of instigator and pro-tem moderator of the site, at COG's invitation, should be seen as necessarily arbitrary and presumptuous. I am in the position for want of anybody else's having come forward for it. Not least, I lack the necessary technical skills for managing the comprehensive resources which I hope the site will in due course develop. The sooner a better qualified successor can be found, the better I will be pleased. By way of introducing myself, I am a onetime Australian Labor Party politician, with current positions as a senior research fellow at Monash University and an adjunct professor at Deakin University. I was previously a federal member of parliament, state MP and minister, municipal councillor and chief of staff to several federal and state Labor leaders, including Australia's former prime minister, Gough Whitlam. I am also a former board member and chairman of the Waverley Credit Union and a former member of the Credit Unions Development Advisory Committee of the Credit Union Services Corporation of Australia. I became interested in Mondragon in the early 1980s, visited there in 1985, 1996, 1997 and 2001 and have written and spoken widely about the Mondragon experience. My doctoral thesis was about Mondragon and the "evolved distributism" philosophy to which I see it as having given expression, as was also my 1999 book Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society (Sydney, Pluto Press (Aust), and London, Comerford and Miller). My full CV is here. In my view, the key feature of the site should be a library where as much as possible of what is written about Mondragon is brought together and made accessible in electronic form. Where copyright constraints apply, it may be that access can be provided by means of links. What matters is that people seeking to be informed about Mondragon should have made available to them a "one stop shop" facility whereby information is either available to them directly or they can be guided to it. Authors are encouraged to submit electronic copies of their work for inclusion in the library, or nominate links where it can be accessed. Secondly COG has proposed that I should undertake the development of a paper on Mondragon for a conference which it is holding in Washington in October. The process is envisaged to be that I should prepare a draft for posting on the site by 31 March, which would then be available there for comment, query, suggestions and requests for elaboration up until - say -August, when a final version would be prepared for presentation in Washington. Pending the posting, comments and suggestions about the process and possible means of improving it will also be appreciated. Finally, COG will welcome offers of help with the further development of the site, and in particular the introduction of new features and resources. What is being attempted, in the best traditions of the co-operative movement, is for us to provide ourselves by working together with services in regard to Mondragon studies for which no other source is available. Dr.
Race Mathews, | ||