La calidad macroeconómica de las empresas de Economía Social frente al modelo empresarial tradicional

Abstract

Over the last few years, interest in the Social Economy from public authorities and academics has grown considerably. This term refers to the collection of entities and businesses whose goal is to meet the needs of their stakeholders by striving to achieve aims other than maximising profits. These alternative objectives may include prioritising personnel over capital, taking decisions democratically, and acting in accordance with the values of solidarity and equality. Among the forms of the Social Economy that academics have studied in most depth are cooperatives, and among them, worker cooperatives are those that have garnered most attention. However, the study of worker cooperatives has traditionally occurred from the perspective of the Social Economy and cooperatives; in other words, basing the research on the specific traits of participation, solidarity, and reciprocity that characterise cooperatives and companies from the Social Economy. Our research addresses the study of worker cooperatives from the perspective of entrepreneurship, with the aim of shedding light on the Social Economy, and on worker cooperatives in particular. More specifically, we focus on a macroeconomic perspective of entrepreneurial quality, which relates entrepreneurial behaviour and the features of an entrepreneurial structure with the degree of economic development in that region (Santos et al., 2012; Fernández & Romero, 2013). In this line, our general aim is to study the worker cooperatives from the perspective of entrepreneurship. We thus develop a theoretical framework that draws upon fundamental aspects of macroeconomic quality of the worker cooperative entrepreneurial group, and their influence on economic development. Furthermore, with the aim of validating this theoretical framework, we perform empirical analysis of data from two Spanish regions that boast a proud Social Economy tradition, but whose levels of economic development are in stark contrast; namely, Andalusia and the Basque Country. This empirical analysis involves two logistic regressions, the technique of student’s t-tests for independent samples, and the creation of an index. All these statistical techniques uses the information obtained through a survey carried out to 808 companies, of which 348 are worker cooperatives, and 460 are traditional firms. Once we develop our empirical analysis, we reach the following conclusions: Broadly speaking, worker cooperatives present a higher entrepreneurial quality than traditional firms, since they have an entrepreneurial behaviour of the same or higher quality than traditional firms, they exhibit a similar business environment to that of traditional firms, and they have an additional component in their entrepreneurial quality from a macroeconomic perspective, the “cooperative essence”. In addition to this, results support the theories that link entrepreneurial quality, from a macroeconomic perspective, to levels of regional economic development, since worker cooperatives from the Basque Country has a better entrepreneurial behaviour and a better entrepreneurial structure than Andalusia in terms of macroeconomic quality, and, also, they have a higher level of “cooperative essence”.