1956 - Credit Union Democracy Cartoon

A cartoon addressing the perennial credit union challenge of member participation in governance from the January 1956 issue of the Bridge:

Book Review - The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann

Given the almost total absence of the cooperative model from mainstream business school discourse, I was recently delighted to hear that an acquaintance was teaching an "Introduction to Cooperatives" course at a college in Connecticut. I was quite curious to see what such a course would consist of, so I went on the website and downloaded the syllabus. While the students were exposed to a diversity of readings, the core of the course seemed to be built around one book, The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann. Intrigued, I got my hands on the text and began digging in.

As its title suggests, the purpose of Hansmann's book is, fundamentally, the investigation of the forms of ownership that are prevalent in different sectors of the economy. Using a perspective that leverages tools from both economics and political science (he understands the governance of firms to be subject to similar political dynamics that public choice theory dissects in government), Hansmann starts off by offering a general theory of ownership that relies on two key factors.