Abdullah KhalidAre cooperatives more virtuous than corporations? This paper explores this question from an economic angle https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470594X251387579
The paper explains that there are four different "constituencies" of a firm: suppliers, customers, investors and workers. A particular firm is usually only owned by a a subset of these constituencies. Common examples of firms are investor-owned corporations; and three types of cooperatives: supplier/customer/worker cooperative.
The central claim of the paper is that whichever constituency does not own the firm, will have to have a contractual relation with the firm. And these relations can often be exploitative. So, for example, worker cooperatives can exploit suppliers as much as corporations.
What the paper leaves out from the analysis, are second order effects of various types of firms: what is the social makeup of a society in which almost all firms are corporations vs where they are all worker cooperatives?