Toward an Organizationally Diverse American Capitalism? Cooperative, Mutual, and Local, State-Owned Enterprise
Toward an Organizationally Diverse American Capitalism? Cooperative, Mutual, and Local, State-Owned Enterprise Marc Schneiberg† ABSTRACT Discussions of economic reform focus on two strategies for tempering corporate excess and mobilizing corporations for growth and prosperi- ty: restructuring markets via competition policies and various forms of countervailing power. Populists, Progressives, and New Dealers looked to anti-trust, regulatory states, and unions as counterweights to corpora- tions. Contemporary efforts look to not-for-profit watchdogs, NGO cer- tification and standard setting, privatization, and corporate governance reform to upgrade markets and deflect corporations from low road paths. This essay recovers a third strategy for regulating and reforming corporate capitalism: promoting organizational diversity via the forma- tion of parallel systems of cooperative, mutual and local, state-owned enterprises. During the “era of corporate consolidation,” producer and consumer groups in the US formed tens of thousands of such enterpris- es in just in agriculture, but also in banking, insurance, and technologi- cally advanced industries like electricity and telephones. These efforts produced enduring systems of cooperatives and kindred enterprise in the American economy, creating alternatives to corporations and orga- nizational legacies for present day problem solving. They provided regulators and policy makers with new options and capacities for state intervention. And they demonstrated possibilities for using mixed or- † John C. Pock Professor of Sociology, Reed College. B.A., Haverford College, 1980; Ph.D., Soci- ology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994. Research for this Article was funded in part by the National Science Foundation grant #0318466, and the Levine and Corbett-Goldhammer Funds at Reed College. I thank Charles O’Kelley, the participants at the Berle II Symposium at Seattle Uni- versity School of Law, Jerry Davis, and the participants at the ICOS seminar at the University of Michigan for helpful feedback on this research.
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