Ethical agency contracts as a basis for co-operative management and leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper argues for the concept of an ethical agency contract as a basis for leadership and management engagement and development in the co-operative context. The paper agrees with Sigismundo B. Neto (2012) that agency problems are complex given the governance structures of co-operatives. Neto does acknowledge the possibility of an ‘ethical agency’ and the paper develops this idea as a possible solution to the mounting record of commercial failure, demutualization and general inertia found in the contemporary co-operative sector. The paper argues this requires both a clear statement of co-operative purpose supporting a definition of co-operative management and leadership’s role to provide the content of an ethical contract. The co-operative business will not achieve its commercial potential without clear differentiation of its brand in terms of its membership of the Co-operative Movement and the social and economic critique of capitalism addressing the challenges of our times that this movement represents. Currently the complex agency challenges inherent in the co-operative governance model and the dependence on the mainstream business school model for co-operative management development are preventing co-operatives fulfilling their mission. This requires a management and leadership recruitment, selection and development programme that can transform the co-operative movements various silos and business models with a common purpose to provide a new political economy that combines business success with global sustainability and individual member economic sufficiency accessible to all the world’s peoples. The paper concludes that co-operative to co-operative networking and collaboration to support this overarching strategic goal cannot succeed without managers committed to a co-operative ethical agency contract grounded on a clear definition of the role of co-operative management and an equally clear behavioural specification of co-operative professional managers as leaders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".