Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (MCC) is the largest worker-owned and controlled cooperative in the world, and the seventh largest corporation in Spain. Originally started as a 24-member worker-owned and controlled factory in the Basque region of Spain, MCC has grown to encompass more than 80,000 workers in 86 cooperatives throughout the country, 44 educational institutions, various consumer, service, and agricultural cooperatives, and a credit union, with well over a billion dollars in assets. The profitability, growth, and innovative management style of the MCC has drawn researchers from both the business and social science fields. At the same time, students of anarchism, mutualism, and workplace democracy continue to be impressed by it, albeit critically, as what Benello (1996) calls “an example of liberatory organization which, like its predecessors in the Spanish Civil War , has achieved success on a scale unequaled in any other part of the world.” MCC was founded by José María Arizmendiarrieta, a young Catholic priest who came to Mondragón, a city in the Guipuzkoa province near Bilbao, Spain, in 1941 to support young parishioners suffering from the social and economic consequences of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). In 1943, Father Arizmendiarrieta started the Professional School (later called Mondragón Unibersitatea), the first graduates of which went on to form Talleres ... log in or subscribe to read full text