Very thrilled to say that our new book, Cooperatives at Work, was released on January 25, 2023 by Emerald Publishers. The book, on worker-owned and cooperatively run organizations today, documents what we have learned from diverse cases of worker cooperatives and worker-run firms in a wide range of sectors from around the world. It was written by six of us, collectively. Sometimes we tussled over paragraphs and sentences together. In other places we relied on each other's experiences and areas of expertise. It was one of the best collaborative writing experiences of my professional life. Thank you for inviting me into the project, George, Matt, Emi, Joseba, and Charlie!
For a preview of the book, go here.
Co-author, Emi Do, wrote a very moving post about our book last week, and I include it below; I couldn't have said it better.
[Cooperatives at Work co-author Emi Do posted the text below recently on social media]
There are endless reasons to lose hope in light of the multiple crises we are confronted by on a seemingly daily basis. I [Emi Do] was dismayed to see that we’re at 90 seconds to the point of annihilation on the doomsday clock and with each episode of mass violence, it is hard to imagine an easy way out of our current state of affairs.
But there’s always a but! Each new crack provides opportunities for ight to seep in and as the revolutionary folks at Guerilla Translation have said “crisis is both a killer and a muse.” For the past four years, I have been given countless opportunities to hope through a collaborative book project entitled Cooperatives at Work. Through interviewing over sixty cooperatives and solidarity based organizations around the world, we squeezed into 250 pages a vision grounded in lived realities, that address the interrelated crises that are economic, social, health-related, and environmental.
We wrote the book that we wanted to read but didn’t yet exist. It highlights examples of democratic organizations that show that alternatives to business as usual are not only possible, but are opportunities for its members to thrive. For those of you who have spent any time with me [Emi Do], you have already put up with hours of cooperative evangelizing, and I hope this book will be a more articulate but no less passionate encapsulation of a vision for a cooperative future.