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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".