ABSTRACT
Mondragon today has established research centres, banks and credit unions, a university, youth cooperatives, and small to large businesses. Founded in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon, the cooperatives now encompass businesses and employ more than 100,000 worker–owners in more than forty countries. Therein, social economics of old, reaching back to such pioneering thinkers as Sismondi in Switzerland, Ruskin and Hobson in Britain, and Gandhi in India, culminates in cooperative enterprise, which is the result of further, pioneering, subsequently institutionalized, social research by the founder of Mondragon. Arizmendi had several close friends and admirers among the clergy, but the Catholic Church did not provide institutional support for his work or for the Mondragon cooperative movement. In reviewing the history of the Basque people, one might speak of their "associative tendencies". To understand Mondragon, we need to understand its organizational culture, including the support system that maintains that culture and influences its ability to change in adaptive ways.
