Employee-owned firms in France
Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership
ISSN: 2514-7641
Article publication date: 19 July 2023
Issue publication date: 10 October 2023
Abstract
Purpose
France is the third country in Europe after Italy and Spain for the number of employee-owned firms, with some 2,600 worker cooperatives (SCOPs). The authors propose a comprehensive review of SCOPs and any barriers to their expansion.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors analyse relevant legislation; review the rich empirical economic literature on SCOPs; and offer new descriptive empirical evidence comparing SCOPs and other French firms.
Findings
SCOPs benefit from a consistent legal framework and a well-structured and supportive cooperative movement. Cooperative laws allow attracting external capital, provide barriers against degeneration and encourage profit allocations that favour investment and labour. SCOPs are distributed across a wide range of industries; are larger than conventional firms, as capital intensive, more productive and survive better. Despite this good performance their number remains modest, perhaps because of information barriers.
Research limitations/implications
An examination of the Italian and Spanish experiences and the relationship between SCOPs and the French labour movement might contribute to explaining the modest number of SCOPs.
Originality/value
The first comprehensive review of French worker cooperatives in four decades and the first with extensive comparative data on SCOPs and conventional French firms. With some of the best data on worker cooperatives in the world, findings have international relevance.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper was commissioned by Copenhagen Business School as part of the project “Analytical Themes on Democratic Enterprises--Drivers and Barriers for Employee Ownership” funded by the Danish Business Authority. The authors thank the project lead, Niels Mygind, as well as two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. We are also grateful to Insee (Institut national de la Statistique et des Etudes économiques) for permission to access official datasets via the secure data access centre CASD (Centre d'accès sécurisé aux données) and to the French confederation of worker cooperatives CG Scop (Confédération Générale des Scop) for communicating data on worker cooperatives.
Citation
Fakhfakh, F., Magne, N., Mirabel, T. and Pérotin, V. (2023), "Employee-owned firms in France", Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 101-127. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPEO-10-2022-0025
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited