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OUR COOPERATIVE DREAM - A CASE STUDY OF ITAS COMPANY, THE BEST ACTOR FROM SOCIAL ECONOMY DATABASE IN CROATIA

After three year of mapping, we gathered data about 112 social economy and entrepreneurship actors in Croatia: 58 association, 39 cooperatives and 15 companies. This research brings more recent data concerning the number of actors, their territorial distribution, type of activity, number of employees, total revenue, and share of revenue from entrepreneurial activities (selling goods and services) in comparison to total revenue. We will present shortly results of 19 focus groups with social economy actors and 21 semi- structured interviews with decission making/support stakeholders, which within iPRESENT project we analysed via qualitative data analysis software (Atlas ti.). One of the most interesting actor in our social economy database is company ITAS which is the bigest one regarding anual revenue and number of employees (+200 people). At the ICA2017 conference this will be the main part of our paper because of ITAS’s unique position in social economy sector in Croatia. On the outside they are regular company, inside they are run in highly democratic manner, main decisions were ruled by all together and they operate more like the usual cooperative and workers owned entity. In the past the survived highly suspected privatization processes in ‘90s during the Homeland war in Croatia, they were blockading the factory to stop sell-off equipment activities, and they went on hunger strike. They became famous as so called “Argentinian style” workers run factory. Now they are in the middle of transformation process regarding governance and organisational design, of which one decision might be cooperative legal structure. Being in that situation, they are of much interest for scientific research. We ran a survey on all employees in ITAS factory questioning their intrinsic values, job satisfaction, openness to new models of organisation between many other important questions. Base for survey was questionnaire from Organisational Psychology that has been tested for many years in Croatia and that measure opinion on 9 characteristics of work. We will present results of this survey at ICA2017 conference and answer on main question: is there an internal will and feasible policy framework for ITAS to become new workers cooperative in Croatia?

social economy, database, workers, cooperative

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