This chapter from Global Cooperative Economics and Movements tackles an elephant in the room: the relationship between traditional worker cooperatives and cooperative-based employee buyout mechanisms, on the one hand, and the rapidly expanding employee-ownership models and their respective buyout mechanisms, on the other.

The authors place these models side by side, comparing their historical and ideological foundations, primary use cases, strengths, and weaknesses, and examine how they relate to one another today – and how this relationship might evolve in the future.