On 10 May, 14:30, Tine De Moor, Thijs Spaargaren (Schoongewoon), and Marijke Flamman (NCR) were the speakers in the webinar ‘The role of cooperatives in democratizing and greening the economy’ of the Dutch chapter of #DemocratizingWork. They talked about the lessons to be learnt from the experiences of modern-day cooperatives. The recorded webinar can be found here.
On 3 May, dr. Mette Løvschal (Aarhus University) was the speaker in our Open Seminar series. In the ANTHEA project, she and her colleagues look at the sustenance of man-made heathlands, which existence spans over millennia. Løvschal went into the ancestral commons and grazing commons that went hand in hand with these heathlands. During the subsequent discussion, some similarities with developments in Europe and North America were considered.
On 21 April, professor Tine De Moor gave a lecture in the Commons Program at the Ostrom Workshop in Bloomington, Indiana. The lecture, titled “Does the History of the Commons Repeat Itself? Building a Taxonomy of Institutions for Collective Action to Study their Spread and Resilience Over Time and Space” is on Youtube.
On 29 March 1:30 PM, Tine De Moor gave a lecture with the title ‘Social enterprises in the Netherlands. Towards more institutional diversity?’ at HEC Liège Management School.
On 29 February, 11AM (CET) the guest speaker of our Open seminar talks series was Lakshmi A.J., who is Assistant Professor at Kerala University, department of Commerce. In her work she focuses on professionalism in co-operatives and the legal framework of credit cooperatives in India, looking at long-term developments.
On 22 March, 11AM (CET) the guest speaker of our Open seminar talks series was Daniel Petrovics (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam). He presented a paper on polycentric governance and the conditions under which energy communities scale.
In een opinieartikel in de Volkskrant riepen Tine De Moor en Ton Duffhues (Rotterdam School of Management) lokale overheden op om in gesprek te gaan met actieve burgers die in hun eigen omgeving uitdagingen op het gebied van wonen, zorg, energie, voedsel en natuur aanpakken. Lees het hele artikel, inclusief de voorbeelden van Herenboerderij Wenumseveld, Austerlitz Zorgt en energiecoöperatie Sterk op Stroom op de website van De Volkskrant.
Are platform cooperatives feasible alternatives to investor-owned gig economy platforms, such as Uber and Deliveroo? In which sectors does the cooperative model work – and for which kind of gig workers is a platform co-op more challenging? Read the analysis by Damion Bunders, Martijn Arets, Koen Frenken and Tine De Moor, ‘The feasibility of platform cooperatives in the gig economy’, which is freely available here.
On 9 March, research team Institutions for Collective Action had a double open seminar. Grant Halliday, historian and research intern at RSM Erasmus University, gave an insight into the development of rules and sanctions in medieval and early-modern fishery cooperatives in Spain. Dr. Florian Grisel, associate professor at the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, complemented Halliday’s findings with a presentation about another fishery cooperative, the Prud’homie de Pêche of Marseille. In the subsequent discussion, the attendants considered the existence of norms versus formal legal structures, as well as the continuation of such organizations over centuries.
On 15 February Kristel Maasen, sociologist at Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) presented a summary of her PhD dissertation in our Open Seminar. Drawing from the theory of the commons and commoning, Maasen shows how worker-organized cooperatives are organized in commons. Workers invest in creating and maintaining a we-relation through task selection, sharing of organisational power, commitment to the project and a focus on direct communication. Distinct from a managerial logic, the principles used by workers correspond to the logic of commons organising in that they produce and reproduce community.