Alan Thomas

The Survival and Growth of Worker Co-Operatives: A Comparison with Small Businesses

ALAN THOMAS AND CHRIS Cornforth are with the Co-operatives Research Unit at the Open University, England. There has been a good deal of theoretical debate and general speculation about the performance of worker co-operatives. However, there has been a shortage of good empirical work has been restricted to case studies or surveys of producer co-operatives formed during the early years of the century in Britain. This paper helps to rectify that situation. It draws upon a complete database of all worker co-operatives formed between 1946-86 in the UK to detail their spread and distribution, and goes on to analyse the survival rates of worker co-operatives, and briefly, their growth rates. Contrary to much of the speculation it concludes that co-operatives have similar survival rates and patterns of growth to those of other small businesses. However, co-operatives tend to be concentrated in certain sub-sectors and their survival rates also vary between sectors, tending to confirm those writers who suggest that despite good performance once set up, co-operatives will tend to have a limited role in the economy.

Sustainable development and African local government: can electronic training help build capacities?

A recent study carried out by European and African organizations into the potential for electronic distance training (EDT) on sustainability in African local governments concluded that EDT was both ‘useful and feasible’. This article reflects on some of the theoretical and practical implications of that study. It focuses on the connection between learning and sustainability and how EDT programmes might be designed and promoted. The paper argues that, while resource issues and poor access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) create considerable constraints and point to the need for policies to improve access, in general the most important factors for successful capacity building relate to the design of learning programmes that take account of the work contexts and skill and capability requirements of those targeted as learners. ‘Useful’ and ‘feasible’ depend on (i) how work‐based and work‐related learning processes are understood and (ii) the conditions to promote learning within African local government.