Publications

BOOK

Spicer, J. Accepted and Forthcoming, 2024. Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American? Oxford University Press.

Selected Academic Articles, Policy Reports, + Public Scholarship

Lamb, Z., Shi, L., & Spicer, J. 2023. Why Do Planners Overlook Manufactured Housing and Resident-Owned Communities as Sources of Affordable Housing and Climate Transformation? Journal of the American Planning Association. 89(1): 72-79.

More Americans live in manufactured housing than in public and federally subsidized rental housing combined. Of the nearly 40,000 U.S. manufactured housing communities (MHCs), more than 1,000 are resident-owned communities (ROCs), a form of cooperative ownership. Yet, planning research continues to neglect MHCs and ROCs, raising questions of classism and cultural bias. We address five common biases against MHCs and argue ROCs in particular deserve greater attention as they enable low-income people to improve their housing security in the face of financial and environmental vulnerabilities. Lessons from these efforts can help other alternative and collective housing providers do the same.

Diop.,T., Ibrahim, F., Lo Hog Tian, J., Yang, D., Widener, M., & Spicer. J. Increasing Meaningful Financial Inclusion in Rwanda: Community-Based Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies. REACH Alliance.

Trana, M., Wandio, C., Spicer, J. & Pace, N. 2023. The 2023 Census of Community Land Trusts in Canada. Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts (CNCLT).

Wang, V., Bennett, A., Corugedo, S., Spicer, J. & Thaden, E. 2023. The 2022 Census of Community Land Trusts and Shared Equity Entities in the United States: Prevalence, Practice, and Impact. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Williams, D., Belay, R., Baker, R., Villasa, O., St. Louis-Mcburnie, K., Guan, J., Lambropoulos, A. & Spicer, J. 2023. Waiving Supplier Diversity Certification Fees For Minority-Owned Business Enterprises. Black Urbanism Toronto.

Spicer, J. 2023. What’s In A Name? Conceptual Frameworks for a Co-operative World pp. 41-60 in Clamp, C., Peck, M. (eds.), Humanity@WorkLife: Global Diffusion of the Mondragon Cooperative Ecosystem Experience. Oaktree Press.

Spicer, J., Stephens, L., & Kramer, A. 2022. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Publicly Owned Variety of Community Land Trust. Journal of Planning Education and Research. Online First, 1-16.

Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maintained with public ownership, it may nonetheless be at greater risk when political winds change. In as much as PLTs secure affordable tenure and community control, they may warrant greater policy/planning consideration.

Lamb, Z., Shi, L., Silva, S., & Spicer, J. 2022. Resident-Owned Resilience: Can Co-operative Land Ownership Enable Transformative Climate Adaptation for Manufactured Housing Communities? Housing Policy Debate. Online First, 1-22.

Residents of manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are disproportionately vulnerable to both hazards and displacement. The cooperative ownership model of resident-owned communities (ROCs) pioneered by ROC USA helps MHC residents resist displacement, but little research assesses how cooperative tenure impacts hazard vulnerability. To fill this gap, we conduct GIS analysis of 234 ROC USA sites; analyze the co-op conversion process; and interview ROC USA staff, technical assistance providers, and resident co-op leaders. While ROC USA communities, like other MHCs, face elevated exposure and sensitivity to hazards, we find that ROC USA’s model supports communities’ adaptive capacity by increasing access to financial resources, bridging formal and informal knowledge and skills, and improving social and institutional capacity. This networked cooperative model represents a scalable form of transformative adaptation by enabling low-income communities to address the underlying causes of uneven hazard vulnerabilities that are intensifying under climate change. We close with public policy and programmatic recommendations to enhance and expand this model.

Spicer, J. & Kay, T. 2022. Another Organization is Possible: New Directions in Research on Alternative Enterprise. Sociology Compass. 16(3):e12963 (18 pages).

Interest in alternative enterprises is again high, yielding a wave of popular experimentation with alternative organizational models, and new scholarship. From an organizational studies perspective, what have we learned about alternative enterprises since the last prior round of such experimentation in the 1970s, and what questions remain unanswered? Reflecting historical research legacies, scholarship often remains focused on micro-aspects of internal organizational dynamics, but recent research at the meso scale has advanced our understanding of alternatives’ field-level construction, and their relationship to external forces and other organizational forms. Less is known, however, at the macro scale about how or why these enterprises develop and are sustained in certain contexts, although work on this front is emerging. Meanwhile, many new alternative organizational forms/practices have not been well-studied. Future research can remedy this oversight, while also seeking to improve our understanding of the effect of external, macro and meso-scaled dynamics of alternative enterprises. It can also seek to better explain variations in alternatives’ institutional development and effectiveness in different sectoral contexts and domains, most notably across today’s crisis-related fronts of climate change, housing precarity, and technological change. In so doing, it could more directly speak to a rising generation’s concerns, and better enable their effective deployment of alternatives in practice.

Spicer, J. & Zhong, M. 2022. Multiple Entrepreneurial Ecosystems? Worker Co-operative Development in Toronto and Montréal. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 54(4): 611-633.
(Award: 2022 Best Paper in Planning and Entrepreneurship Competition - 2nd Prize, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning .)

The emergence in practice of worker cooperative ecosystems, which draws on the entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) concept, has been largely ignored in academic research. Contrasting worker cooperative development efforts in Toronto with Montréal, we affirm there are multiple and multi-scalar EEs in each region, including both a dominant capitalist and a worker cooperative EE. Productive enterprises like worker cooperatives, operating with a different logic than investor-owned firms, not only construct their own EE, but the relational connectedness of the worker cooperative EE to other EEs also plays a role in outcomes. Worker cooperatives have been less successful navigating these dynamics in Toronto than Montréal. Future research might seek to more fully specify the relational and multi-scalar configuration of regions’ multiple EEs.

Spicer, J. 2022. Co-operative Enterprise at Scale: Comparative Capitalisms and the Political Economy of Ownership. Socio-Economic Review. 20(3): 1173-1209.

Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives’ variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic, and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieties of Capitalism and Welfare Regimes), are a significant factor in this variation. Cooperatives scale in a manner which complements arrangements in coordinated market economies, while exhibiting institutional incongruencies with those of liberal market economies and residual welfare states. Public policies which have variously enhanced or inhibited cooperatives’ ability to coordinate to scale are compared across four case countries (United States, France, Finland, New Zealand). Policy differences are shown to reflect the joint effect of state-mediated institutional arrangements alongside other control variables. They reveal how states privilege some ownership forms over others, suggesting a distinct political economy of ownership. 

Lamb, Z., Spicer, J., & Shi, L. 2022. Debunking Stereotypes About Manufactured Housing Could Make Them A New Face of Affordable Housing. The Conversation.

Scholz, T., O’Brien, D., & Spicer, J. 2021. Can Co-operatives Build Worker Power? Give Platform Co-ops a Seat at the Policy Table. Public Seminar.

Kay, T. & Spicer, J. 2021. A Non-Profit Networked Platform for Global Health. Stanford Social Innovation Review. 19(1): 18-25.

Spicer, J. & Lee-Chuvala, C. 2021. Alternative Enterprises, Mission Drift, and Ownership: The Case of Values-Based Banking. Research in the Sociology of Organizations. (72): 257-291.
(Award: 2022 Joyce Rothschild Prize, Rutgers University, School of Management and Labor Relations, Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing.)

Alternative enterprises – organizations that operate as a business while still also being driven by a social purpose – are sometimes owned by workers or other stakeholders, rather than shareholders. What role does ownership play in enabling alternative enterprises to prioritize substantively rational organizational values, like environmental sustainability and social equity, over instrumentally rational ones, like profit maximization? We situate this question at the intersection of research on: (1) stakeholder governance and mission drift in both hybrid and collectivist-democratic organizations; and (2) varieties of ownership of enterprise. Though these literatures suggest that ownership affects the ability of alternative enterprises to maintain their social missions, the precise nature of this relationship remains under-theorized. Using the case of a global, social, and environmental values-based banking network, we suggest that alternative ownership is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to combat mission drift in enterprises that have a legal owner. A super majority of this network’s banks deploy alternative ownership structures; those operating with these structures are disproportionately associated with social movements, which imprint their values onto the banks. We show how alternative ownership acts through specific mechanisms to sustain enterprises’ missions, and we also trace how many of these mechanisms are endogenous to alternative ownership models. Finally, we find that ownership models vary in how well they enable the expression and maintenance of these social values. A ladder of mission-sustaining ownership models exists, whereby the dominance of substantive, non-instrumental values over operations and investment becomes increasingly robust as one moves up the rungs from mission-driven investor ownership to special shareholder and member-ownership models.

Spicer, J. 2020. Worker and Community Ownership as an Economic Development Strategy: Innovative Rebirth or Tired Retread of a Failed Idea? Economic Development Quarterly. 34 (4): 25-42.

A generation ago, American state and local experiments with worker and community ownership appeared unsuccessful. Does their current revival offer anything new to the field of economic development or is this merely a tired retread of a failed idea? Using historical analysis, case studies, and interview data from three U.S. regions, the author analyzes the current range of initiatives that seek to remove impediments, stimulate development, and provide direct technical and financial support to worker and community-owned enterprises. The author also identifies how these efforts differ from those in the past, with respect to scope, scale, and success orientation. Collectively, these differences suggest a focus on engaging with, rather than escaping from, market-based economic development. Key challenges are also identified: popular education, community capacity, competitive pressure, early-stage financing, and managing political content. While too early to assess outcomes, these differences suggest the possibility of more substantial results than in the past.

Spicer, J., Manduca, R. & Kay, T. 2020.National Living Wage Movements in a Regional World: The Fight for $15 in the United States  pp. 41-67in Reimagining the Governance of Work and Employment: LERA Annual Research Volume. Cornell University Press/Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA).

The US living wage movement has grown from a minor municipal phenomenon into a nationally prominent “fight” for a $15 hourly wage. We argue future success may depend on simultaneously addressing two challenges. First, the national movement must navigate the regionally divergent economic effects of the very same forces of economic, technological, and institutional change to which it is partly a response. Second, its leaders must also continue to coordinate efforts across multiple political scales, the very structure of which is changing under proponents’ feet. How these two challenges interact to affect the Fight for $15 has been wholly ignored. Using local living wage data, we consider the extent to which a regionally heterogeneous cost of living structure and multi-scalar politics have strategic implications for a national living wage movement. Specifically, we show why it is important to understand drivers of unaffordability in different regions, because varying cost structures and politics present different avenues for reform. We are not arguing the Fight for $15 eschew its original goals. Rather, further success may require incorporating additional policy strategies informed by American economic and political geography.

Spicer, J. & Casper-Futterman, E., 2020. Conceptualizing Community Economic Development — Evidence from New York City. Journal of Planning Education & Research. Online First, 1-20.

Building from the “Progressive Cities” era toolkit, advocates of community economic development (CED) today deploy a wide range of new and well-established strategies. How can planners make theoretical and practical sense of these varying tactics? Using New York as a case and sociological strategic action field theory as a framing device, we find evidence of three distinct CED logics: exactive/concessionary, localist, and transformative/democratic. We differentiate these logics based on their relationship to neoliberalism and globalization, forces which have shaped CED’s historical development. Awareness of these ideal-type logics may assist planners and CED actors in selecting and coordinating contextually appropriate strategies.

Spicer, J., Kay, T. & Ganz, M.  2019. Social Entrepreneurship as Field Encroachment: How A Neoliberal Social Movement Constructed a New Field. Socio-Economic Review, 17 (1): 195-227.
(Award: Editor’s Choice Article.)

In explaining the emergence of new strategic action fields, in which social movements’ and organizations’ logic, rules and strategies are forged, inter-field dynamics remain under-explored. The case of Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (SEE) shows how new fields can emerge through field encroachment, whereby shifts among overlapping fields create structural opportunities for the ascendency of new fields, which may adapt logics borrowed from adjacent fields to construct legitimacy. SEE leveraged the 1980s’ shift between first-order market and state fields to encroach on the political strategies of community organizing, birthing a neoliberal social movement to create a new field addressing social problems using market-based, profit-motivated approaches. With its borrowed veneer of justice, SEE rapidly developed a high academic and public profile over just three decades, despite little evidence its approach to solving social problems works. In encroaching on proven political strategies for solving social problems, it may further undermine democratic practices.

Casper-Futterman, E., & J. Spicer. 2019. The Just Transition, Economic Democracy and the Green New Deal. Metropolitics.

Spicer, J. 2018. Electoral Systems, Regional Resentment and the Surprising Success of Anglo-American Populism. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11 (1): 115–141.

As populist movements, partly fueled by voters in excluded regions, drive national electoral backlashes to globalisation, why have their only outright successes come in the USA and UK? Synthesising urban/regional development theory with comparative politics, this article examines a previously unconsidered contributing factor: the interaction of globalisation’s rising inter-regional disparities with majoritarian electoral systems. Majoritarianism’s distinct internal dynamics and imperfect representation mechanisms yield insufficient state responses to rising inter-regional inequality, stoking populist discontent. Global integration may thus be less stable today under majoritarian than proportional electoral rules. This has implications for urban/regional development scholarship, globalisation’s durability and electoral reform.

Ganz,M., Kay, T., & Spicer, J. 2018. Social Enterprise is Not Social Change. Stanford Social Innovation Review. 16(2): 2-4.