Evaluating the Legal and Governance Structures of Shared-Services Platform Cooperatives
* Report: Everything Old is New Again: Evaluating the Legal and Governance Structures of Shared-Services Platform Cooperatives. Morshed Mannan. Institute for the Digital Cooperative Economy, Platform Cooperativism Consortium,
URL = https://ia801707.us.archive.org/9/items/morshed-mannan-single-web/Morshed%20Mannan_single_web.pdf
Summary
Morshed Mannan:
"This is a study of two businesses that have built a cooperatively-governed technological infrastructure for shared use among cooperatives in their network, using the resources contributed by those cooperatives. In the particular context of the platform economy, this includes the co-development and co-ownership of software applications for online matchmaking platforms by several (loosely) connected businesses. As such, these organizations bear a resemblance to time-tested supply and shared-services cooperatives in the agricultural and retail sectors, thereby showing how the past continues to offer lessons for contemporary businesses, including those developing ‘disruptive’ technologies. These businesses, ‘The Mobility Factory’ [TMF] , ‘Eva’, and others like them, will be referred to as shared-services platform cooperatives. This study shows that shared-services platform cooperatives have begun to emerge from another set of cooperatives, known as platform cooperatives (Scholz, 2017, 2014), in a bid to share costs as well as to achieve scale. The methodology used is a comparative case study (Gerring, 2006, p. 27), with two cases in the urban mobility sector. The objective of these two exploratory case studies is to contribute to the development of theory regarding the formation of shared-services platform cooperatives by first, describing and comparing the legal and governance structures of two such ‘network organizations’ and second, investigating the rationale behind their choices of structure. This will allow the formulation of new hypotheses on the legal and governance structures employed by emergent shared-services platform cooperatives and may hold lessons for similar entities.
This study makes three contributions to the existing research on the platform economy. First, it provides an in-depth examination of the legal and governance structures of two novel businesses at the intersection of the platform, circular and solidarity economies, neither of which have previously been the subject of academic study. Moreover, it showcases the real-world instantiation of a hypothesized—but seldom seen— organizational structure in the platform economy. Second, drawing on the existing research on primary and secondary cooperatives, social franchising and property rights in common goods, it evaluates some of the opportunities and challenges that the use of these structures raise. Third, in an undertheorized field, it develops seven hypotheses regarding shared-services platform cooperatives, which may be tested as more shared services platform cooperatives are formed.
The second section will be devoted to expanding on the origins of the shared-services platform cooperative concept, followed by a brief explanation of the case study methodology in the third section. The fourth section will set out the two cases, focusing particularly on the legal and governance structure they have respectively opted for, before the fifth section compares the two cases and discusses the rationale for their choice of structure. This section will also elaborate on the two structures used by these cases, the European Cooperative Society (the Societas Cooperativia Europaea, SCE) and the social franchise system, as distinct forms of network organizations for owning and governing shared technological infrastructure. Based on the experience of existing SCEs and social franchises, the potential and risks of these structuring options will be drawn out for the benefit of future shared-services platform cooperatives. The sixth and final section will conclude by reflecting on seven hypotheses that emerge from this theory-building study. These hypotheses posit that the choice of a shared-services platform cooperative will turn on the capacity of a primary cooperative to internally develop intellectual property, the importance it places on a global/local brand identity and its need to own and license tangible assets for the success of its business model. The section will conclude with suggestions as to future research."