Entrepreneurship and collective actions in worker-recovered enterprises: A critical assessment

Worker-recovered enterprises are investor-owned businesses that have been taken over by their former employees and converted into labour- or worker-managed firms. These firms have always been rare in mature economies. Scholars suggested that the scarcity of labour-managed firms is due to the number of firm entrants since their survival and lifespan performances are comparable if not superior to traditional firms. The entry of worker-recovered enterprises differs from traditional firms in that these enterprises undertake both recovery and conversion processes under workers’ leadership. Besides workers, a plurality of economic and non-economic actors play a crucial role in crafting the new ventures via collective resource-pooling, decisionmaking and risk-sharing actions. Nevertheless, the contours of collective entrepreneurial arrangements in worker-recovered enterprises are under-researched and under-theorized. By leveraging the concepts of stakeholder and collective action, this paper offers theoretical insights into the collective entrepreneurial dynamics of worker-recovered enterprises.