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Jason S. Spicer, "Co-Operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American?" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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welcome to the New Books Network
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B
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Elcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jason Spicer about his book published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, though about to come out later in 2026 in paperback. And the book is titled Cooperative Enterprise in Comparative Persp Exceptionally un American. Now this book, as the title suggests, does interesting comparison. I'm always a fan of comparative analysis and this book does exactly that, taking us back in time to look at some history and history that helps us make sense of the present, which I am also always a fan of. So we're going to be talking about cooperative enterprises, how they currently work, how they have worked in a few different countries, obviously the US being one of them. So Jason, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast podcast to tell us about your research.
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A
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me as well.
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B
Well, I'm very glad you said yes. Could you start us off please by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What kinds of questions did you want to investigate?
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A
Sure. Well, again, my name is Jason Spicer and I'm an associate professor at two different units of the public university system in the city of New York, which is called cuny, the City University of New York. And I te in what is effectively the Systems Policy School, which is the Marx School of Public and International affairs at Baruch College. And I also teach in the Social Welfare PhD program at the CUNY Graduate center as well. And this project really began, I can scarcely believe it, more than 15 years ago or about 15 years ago, when I got involved in the Occupy movement here in New York. And one thing I observed and in conversations I had with other participants in the Occupy movement was, as you know, the framing of the 99% versus the 1% in global economic inequality in the wake of the financial crisis that was occurring globally back then. Was, was there a way to move towards an economy that didn't generate these redistribution problems and have this extreme level of inequality? And there's a political scientist at Yale named Jacob Hacker who has subsequently framed this as pre distribution. How do we pre distribute wealth and resources differently? And one of the things that kept coming up in those conversations was what they might have once called ownership of the means of production, but today we might just say a broad based ownership of the economy in a more democratic way. And you know, the grandparent of those types of business models is the cooperative model. And so that got discussed in different conversations. But the response and the commentary I kept hearing was, well, we're just not very good at that in the United States. And to put it in the language of American exceptionalism, hence the subtitle of the book, they might be exceptionally un American. And just to clarify what American exceptionalism means, I don't mean to imply that America is better. What I mean is, I'm referring, it's a bit of a dog whistle term for social scientists and social thinkers. There is a long running argument that we can trace back to Tocqueville hundreds of years ago that America is different. And the typical rules that we find about how economies are set up or how societies are set up always seemed to require an asterisk for the United States of America. So there was this sense that there's something about America that's different. Well, maybe we're just too individualistic as a culture. And as I sat with that idea, it bothered me because the reality is in the 19th century, if you read your Engels, he talked about how the United States had one of the world's leading labor movements, and European labor movements were in awe that the United States labor movement seemed to be skipping over some of the stages of development that other movements had. So I thought, well, that doesn't make sense. We've, we've had a world leading labor movement before and the United States has also been tremendously innovative in leading the way in terms of what sociologists and political scientists will often call the repertoire of contention in collective social movements. So the US has a rich history of innovating, incubating, institutionalizing collective action models across centuries, including of course through the civil rights movement in the last century in the United States and in subsequent successor movements. So I thought, well, this doesn't seem to be a viable answer. And as the years went by, I found myself compelled to turn it into an academic project which became a series of articles and then led to this book which the initial impetus and motivation was are there fewer co ops in the US and if so, why might that be the case? And in one of the prequel articles to the book, I looked at a current snapshot of cooperatives across the US in comparison to other high income countries that are democratic, so they share some similar institutional lineages, so we often call them the rich democracies. And I measured the prevalence of large scale cooperatives and large scale because we know that larger enterprises dominate economic activity that's formal and play an outsized role in the economy. That's been a demonstrated fact for centuries. And what I found was in fact the US is towards the bottom of effectively the national league tables. And I developed some statistical models to help explain that, which revealed four significant factors that might be at work. And then I traced how those factors manifest in the current policy environment for cooperatives in the US which I treat as a case of relative or comparative failure against three much more successful countries when measured on the current prevalence of larger cooperatives. And those three countries are Finland, France and New Zealand. So we've got one of the cases at the bottom which is the United States. And as an American I was quite interested, as I said, in the US case, which in the book becomes the central case in a comparative historical book that's given more weight and it's contrasted against these three relatively more successful cases, Finland, France and New Zealand, that also exhibit some variation with respect to the causal dimensions I had statistically measured as mattering for explaining variation across the rich democracies today in terms of the prevalence of these types of cooperative democratically co owned businesses, as it were. And so I answered that in a sequel or prequel article in a journal called Socioeconomic Review, also had an article in Economic Development Quarterly about the US efforts recently and the Burning question then was, okay, I've shown that American cooperatives and cooperators, as they refer to themselves, are living in a very different policy and business environment than cooperators in relatively more successful countries at this model. And I had traced and examined how and why it was now. But the real question was how did we get here and why are we like this? And how did we get to this very different outcome with respect to, to cooperation at scale? And so that became the motivating impetus for the book. Does that answer that question?
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B
It definitely does and I think gives us a lot more to discuss. The first of which being you've clearly laid out the case for why looking at the US in comparative perspective is really helpful. And kind of briefly about what some of the other comparisons are you've undertaken in this book. Of course, you primarily focus on Finland, France and New Zealand. Why those three in particular?
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A
Yeah, so great question, Miranda. And those three countries have many, many more large scale cooperatives today than almost any other rich democracy. They're at the top of the league tables. Using two different measures I constructed. There was one other case that was close and that is Italy. It ranks just below them. And those three countries exhibit variation across some of the statistical constructs. I had found matter in explaining the current variation and those factors. It would now be a good time to explain what those factors are.
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Sure, go for it.
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Okay, so the four factors that showed up are. The first is what sociologists would call social homophily, but economists or political scientists might refer to homogeneity or heterogeneity, meaning bonds of similarity rooted in identity, be it rooted in race, religion or language, most typically between individuals. A second is a different type of homogeneity or heterogeneity, and that is economic heterogeneity and homogeneity or industry mix. Bluntly, if you're trying to have a cooperative model that's democratic and you're cooperativizing an input or an output that is quite similar, for example, a gallon of milk, which you can pool them together and they can be quite similar. The costs of democratic decision making, the transaction costs are typically seen as lower. Similarly with the first factor I just mentioned, if you have bonds of similarity between people rooted in some shared identity, it's easier and the costs are presumed lower for those types of, of subpopulation. So those are two factors. A third factor was the arrangements of economic individualism or liberalism. And specifically looking at some comparative frameworks known as the varieties of capitalism literature or the world of welfare capitalism literature which highlight different ways that firms, sometimes individual firms, relate to one another across countries. And they show that there's different rules for how firms are restricted from coordinating and combining. And one thing I had noted is in liberal countries like the United States and other Anglophone countries that are similar to the United States, firms are typically restricted through aggressive antitrust and anti, well, competition policy laws from combining in ways that cooperatives naturally do to get to scale. And we call it Principle 6. It's one of seven principles of cooperation. Cooperatives tend to supply and form supply networks up and down the supply chain with other cooperatives, and that is restricted in some countries more than others. And when I actually audited liberal versus less liberal forms of structuring the economy across a number of different dimensions of these economically liberal frameworks, I found this incongruence or dissonance between how cooperatives organize themselves and the policy environment. So those are two of the factors. And then or three of the factors. The fourth is geographic factors such as remoteness, size and the geographic position in in the world economy where if you're farther away from the center of trade gravity, if you're remote, you may use the cooperative model to organize yourselves to connect to distant markets, for example. So these were the factors that I systematically examined in the current study I published. Before that, I also wanted to examine and see which factors explain variation in these cases either as a headwind or a tailwind over time historically. And you asked him why these three cases? These three other cases are all relatively strong, but they also vary with respect to the presence or absence of these different factors as either a headwind or tailwind in explaining cooperation at scale.
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A
Yeah, great, great question, Miranda. So Finland in some ways is kind of the mirror image of the United States, where it basically has all four of those factors I just mentioned as a tailwind for cooperation at scale historically. And a quote I love that I opened the Finnish chapter with, which pretty much sums it up, comes from the late Finnish Nobel laureate in chemistry, Vertanen, who said, we have no Rockefellers or Carnegies, but we have cooperatives in Finland. And that's kind of, kind of it in a nutshell. Basically, Finland's economy developed later. It had been a dependency of Sweden and Russia for century. And what effectively happened was a couple of cooperative actors learned about the model from other countries where it was developing across Europe and connected it to the Fennamin movement, the Finnish independence movement. And the cooperative became a tool for both political, political and economic independence from Russia. And as Finland established itself as an independent nation state and an independent economy, the cooperative ownership model was a way that they could assert economic sovereignty as well as political sovereignty at the same time. And it was rooted in this distinct, again, social, homophily national identity of the Finnish people, which a common mistake that many people make is they lump the Finns in with its neighboring Scandinavian nations like Sweden, Norway, Denmark. The Finns are genetically, linguistically, culturally, quite distinct and separate from those other nations. And I review some of that in the book, and there is a distinctive shared national identity that helps be the animating force for this cooperative linked independence movement. So what they do is they create an entire infrastructure almost overnight in what we call a cooperative big bang. And they set up an enabling policy environment with local cooperatives that feed up international cooperatives. They get the new national government, which is full of cooperative members and cooperative advocates to create laws that enable them to get fair, level playing field treatment against other types of firms. And in fact, early leaders in the Finnish government, including presidents and prime ministers, come right out of the cooperative movement. So it would be the equivalent of having a cooperative leader be the prime minister of Britain or the president of the United States. And so they get on the map and then over time, as the Finnish economy shifts, you'll have to read the book to see how that unfolds. But the cooperative movement, although it faces some challenges and it struggles when Finland joins the EU and liberalizes its economy, liberalism is a problem for cooperatives everywhere when it appears, which is one of the factors in the book. But they keep reorganizing and renewing the movement so that it continue to meet the challenges of today, or so it can continue. So that's the Finnish case moving on to the French case. In France, the story's a bit different and the surprise there is if you know anything about France, you think about the French Revolution and then subsequent revolutions. There always seems to be revolutions in France, but the story of cooperation and cooperatives in France is about the revolution to a degree, but it's actually surprisingly much more about evolution, and I call it the French evolution in the book. And what happens in France is France again has a slightly later developing economy than places like Britain or the United States. And at the time of the French Revolution, it was still heavily reliant in the late 1700s on feudal economic arrangements. And those arrangements which contain forerunners to both today's cooperatives and today's traditional investor owned firms, all of those predecessor forms effectively get wiped out in the original French Revolution. Revolution as disallowed intermediaries between the people and the state. If you go back to the framing in French. But what then happens is over generations and across revolutions and in intermediate evolutionary periods between revolutions, cooperatives and other types of economic associations grow back over time because the French economy and government realized they can't do without all of these things entirely. It's not going to work. And they realized that very quickly in history. I review in the book, after the initial French Revolution. So eventually they get formal legal recognition. But you get this, what one French scholar calls in the French, I'll translate, an effervescence of special provisions where slowly, over time, the cooperative movement gets formal recognition alongside unions and associations and other types of economic organizations and Forms 4 Interlocking Cooperative movements that winds up speaking to the government through a formal high council of cooperation and really gets the enabling Infrastructure it needs, just like Finland did, but through a very different and much more evolutionary process. Same story later on, where France's economy liberalizes Starting in the 70s co op struggle, but they reinvent the sector as part of a broader allied movement called the social and solidarity economy, which has started to spread across other romance language economies, but also to English speaking countries like the United States as well. USS in French, in English, the social and solidarity economy. And again they update the policy and business infrastructure to meet the challenges of the day. But in France, again and again it became part of their national identity and their national labor movements and democratic socialist movements. And European would see in these revolutions the cooperative workshop, which would evolve over time and then there'd be a cooperative bank and a whole set of institutional experiments in these high profile revolutions that are really at the beating heart of the French national project of the relationship between people in the state and what's allowed to come between that and not. And this notion of liberty in France, that's, that's quite distinct and is part of its national motto, of course that involves fraternity as well. So hopefully that, that, that answers that question on those two cases.
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B
Yeah. And I mean, I have to admit to some extent, as soon as I realized the book was about cooperatives, I was like, okay, well surely he's going to talk about France, right. And surely we're going to be talking about the Nordic countries in, in some respect. And the reasons you've just explained there are like why that kind of vague reckon like has actual information to really back it up. I admit I was a little bit more surprised to read about the New Zealand case in the book, especially because you describe it as being perhaps the most similar sort of setup to the US and yet it has a bunch of cooperatives, which the US doesn't. So what's going on there?
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A
Yeah, and New Zealand is for me such a fascinating place case and I'm glad you found it that way as well. And the headline there really is Geography Trumps Liberalization. So New Zealand is a liberal country today, meaning it has more of an American style economy. But the short answer was it wasn't always that way. And historically New Zealand's economy was set up in a different way and it was set up more akin to some of the other types of rich democracies. And what happens in New Zealand is it is set up obviously as a settler colonial state primarily by British colonists and settlers. And it's, it's set up mostly in most of its major cities and economic agglomerations are set up on joint stock company plans that are traded on the London stock exchange almost 200 years ago. And they have these ideas that they're going to build this kind of utopian capitalist paradise. And it's a total disastrous failure. They had grossly misjudged the nature of the land, how remote they would be, what its implications were for these business models. And so what has to happen and does happen is, is the state steps in the fledgling New Zealand government and they effectively create what we would call a developmental state that partners with cooperatives and cooperative like entities to organize the economy to effectively become Britain's farm. And you get an export oriented economy in the early 1900s that is really built off of these interlocking cooperatives, farmers cooperatives and then consumer cooperatives to a degree, financial cooperatives that help organize the state in the wake of that initial failure. And resonating with that, the same organization that would try to do this in the United States, which we haven't gotten into yet, called the Knights of Labor. And they struggle in the US they win in New Zealand in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They win strong labor protections, a strong welfare state. New Zealand looks like a very more social democratic, almost like a Nordic style economy back then, before they even they were necessarily doing it. And it's only then later that New Zealand was liberalizes in the 1980s through paradoxically labor, the Labor Party led program of liberalization, which the money quote there is. It made Thatcher look timid by comparison. And it gets called rogernomics and ruth in Asia after two key politicians in New Zealand. And again cooperatives start to struggle there. But they're able to reorganize with a backlash where New Zealand through liberalization realizes that it's at risk of being owned by foreign investors. And so the cooperative model gets reinvigorated again as a way to meet the moment. So that's what happens in the New Zealand case.
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B
Okay, very interesting indeed. And I'm shuddering to think about more Thatcher than Thatcher. Like goodness, that is really quite a change. But I think these comparisons you've laid out now kind of help us start to do some thinking about, well, what is and isn't different than with the history of the US and this sort of similar kind of time period. And obviously the US there's is not the same as France or Finland or New Zealand. Like all these countries have specific things in their histories. But you do point to perhaps the institution of slavery in the US as being one of the reasons that there Weren't a lot of cooperatives and maybe even a legacy that still explains a lack of cooperatives now.
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A
Yes, and of course it is. It is always challenging to talk about this subject in particularly our current political context, but I think it's important to do so. And what happened in the US case is from the beginning in the US cooperative movement, advocates for this model that were trying to organize the field faced unique challenges. And in trying to advocate for the cooperative model, which is a distinct ownership model, there were two competing ownership models which were exceptionally well developed, more so than in the other countries that I study, that were based on a different logic. And they blocked the cooperative field organizers from doing what they needed to do to effectively create that type of cooperative policy and business infrastructure. And those two competing ownership models were the investor ownership model, which was far more advanced in the US than anywhere else. That's well established history in the 1800s. But then there was the ownership of people through the race based chattel slavery institutions, which we often don't think of that as a type of ownership model, but that's what it was economically. And it was spread not just across plantations, but industry in the south as well. And what happened both after the Civil War, before slavery ended, and then before the Civil War and after the Civil War is both of the two field builders for cooperation. The communitarian movement before the Civil War and the Knights of labor afterwards really struggled with this issue of wage slavery, which is what they called being an investor owned firm's employee and race based slavery itself. And literally calling traditional employment relationships, or what we think of them as today, wage slavery was triggering right and resulted in a backlash not just from traditional investor owned employers, capitalists we might call them, and their, their interlocutors, but also from the slave owning class in the south and beyond. And this issue nearly tore these movements apart. And in the end it does tear apart the knights of labor who march into the south in the late 1880s at the height of their strength on a plan to replace white ownership of black labor with multiracial collective ownership through the cooperative model. And it's a very disturbing history in the book just to warn people they come to a bloody end and what happens is they collapse spectacularly at that point. And as new labor movement organizations like the afl, which can exist today as the AFL CIO in the United States, take the reins of the labor movement, they explicitly avoid cooperatives and cooperation. And this continues for generations. And even then, as you get replacement organizing bodies, they avoid engaging across white and black the racial line divide. Black cooperatives are sabotaged. They're not allowed to formally incorporate, all while even the white cooperative movement is facing attacks in Congress through what gets called a tax war that continues well into the 20th century. Racial issues, as I document in the book, continue to manifest in the economy across the 20th century through these and other mechanisms. So it is a long stretching legacy. And people sometimes might say, slavery ended 160 years ago. Why does it still matter? And hopefully that explanation for cooperatives specifically helps explain how and why it was institutionally transmitted over time.
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B
It definitely, I think, makes sense of kind of how we've gotten to this point, how the US has gotten to this point, how other countries have gotten to their respective points. What might this mean, though, for the future? Could the US have more cooperatives going forward?
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A
Yes, I mean, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? And I think this model is underused in the US And I think in most countries, even in the countries where they've been relatively more successful, there's a lot these models can do to help governments deliver on their agendas and to help bring sustainability and equality and equity to our economies around the world. But I think to do that, they need to diagnose and face some of the challenges that have gotten them to where they are. And in the US case, I think that means dealing with this joint legacy that sometimes gets referred to together as racial capitalism. But I think there's really two strands there, as it might have been clear by how I talked about them separately that then intersect. And for me, what I think it means, and I try to conclude this way in the book, is we need to have a working people's movement in this country that, yes, is a rainbow coalition, but that centers the voices and concerns of those who've historically and through the present time most often been most left behind, and that is people of color. But to be clear, I'm talking about both a race and class argument taken together. And we are in a moment where movements that deal with these issues are recalibrating and learning in the United States that we cannot have a movement that tries to talk about one simply isolated from the other and think that it's going to maximize its success. And I'm drawing, of course, on the arguments of Adolf Reid and others who have talked about this need to think about race and class together and intersectionally. And I think that is a way that cooperative coalitions can help have more success in the United States.
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B
Well, we shall certainly see something to look forward to. In the future. And of course there's your work as well. Ongoing in future too. So before I let you go, is there anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of that you're currently working on?
- [36:59]
A
Yes, I'm actually doing some statistical work on worker cooperative, specifically in the United States compared to some related similar forms looking at community land trusts in the United States as well as living wage movements. My broader research agenda is really about alternative business models and economic justice, and I think cooperatives are one of a suite of tools that we can use to accomplish a lot of goals. And so that is my ongoing research project. If people want to learn more, they can always go to my website, Jason
- [37:35]
B
Spicer.org well, and of course they can read the book we've been discussing titled Cooperative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective, Exceptionally Un American, published in hardback in 2024 by Oxford University Press and later this year in 2026 in paperback. Jason, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:54]
A
Thank you, Miranda, for having me me. It's been a real pleasure.
- [37:57]
B
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