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I spent a lot of my twenties trying to get a publishing group off the ground using a worker co-op model. It became clear pretty quickly that a hierarchy of responsibility was needed simply to keep the workflow moving, as relying on the self-motivation of contributors was a recipe for disaster, especially for those doing editorial or production work.
In my estimation, it can work, but only if the workers take on the attitude that they truly own the business and are responsible for it. This requires a higher level of scrutiny on incoming members than in a traditional business structure, as bad actors can have an outsized affect on a organization with loose hierarchical controls.
Sadly, my experience led me to believe that most people are more willing to work for someone telling them what to do than they are for themselves. The ability to muster effort and energy behind effective self-motivation is a rarer trait than most of us would like to admit. For a co-op to be successful against corporate competitors, every worker has to take responsibility for the organization and its success. In a corporation, only the boss has to - the workers only have to be responsible for what their boss thinks of them, not the direction of the company.
Co ops can have traditional chains of command, the only defining characteristic of a co op is ownership. There's no reason why a leadership hierarchy and leader ownership must go hand in hand.
A well-functioning co op can take in any worker irrespective of work ethic and provide them with the structure and support to develop into a valuable team member. The problem is that co ops, like anything aren't guaranteed to function well.
So no, a co op does not require all workers within in be fundamentally minded towards the business. A co op simply means that the ownership of the company and the labour force are one in the same. There are plenty of co op workers all over the world who just show up and do their job, they just also have a voice and must be considered differently as a result.
They could be linked by voting rights. If you have ten equal owners, then you’ve got the equal voters in terms of board decisions.
I agree with your first paragraph, and once we instituted a traditional hierarchy of responsibility in the form of editors and publishers with defined timetables and expectations, things ran more smoothly - the effort lasted 12 years in all before closing.
However, the amount of management and moderation involved from those placed at the top was far greater than in a comparable corporate structure, in large part due to the human behavior factors I addressed above. This led to burnout, and which had a cascading effect on those with less responsibility. While I don't regret what we accomplished, I've come to the conclusion it would have been undoubtedly easier to succeed in the publishing space with a corporate structure.
As such, I disagree with your assumption in the latter half of your comment that a co-op can take in any worker irrespective of ethic. A co-op thrives because it's a community that relies on each other. When you introduce bad actors into the mix, who are benefiting without contribution, it breeds resentment and similar behavior if not corrected quickly - especially if you're working on a profit-share basis. My experience in both the non-profit and corporate worlds has shown that the latter can absorb a much higher ratio of these bad actors than a co-op or non-profit can, as these latter organizations rely on an equitable social contract to motivate their workforce. Corporations just rely on a paycheck.
I might argue that most people don't really know how to handle autonomy. We're all trained to follow orders and probably have to be trained on how to work otherwise. It's a huge culture shock.
I'm often not sure at what point my authority/autonomy ends and my boss' begins. And we have a clean top-down structure.
Being part of a co-op isn’t an autonomous situation. You have the responsibility of ownership, but you aren’t free to implement decisions as you see fit. You have to get buy-in from the group for anything you do.