The theoretical and empirical literature reports that worker co-operatives protect employment better than investor-owned firms (IOFs) do, especially during economic downturns. This paper introduces the new hypothesis that not only worker co-operatives but all co-operative types (e.g. worker, producer, consumer, credit) protect employment better than IOFs do because they all satisfy their members’ needs—instead of maximizing shareholder value—by delivering a stable stream of goods and services. A long-standing pattern in needs satisfaction implies constant activity and employment. To substantiate our hypothesis theoretically, we resort to the evolutionary interpretation of the firm as a problem solver and to the literature on organizational resilience. We test the hypothesis using the data released by the Italian Institute of Statistics for all Italian enterprises in the 1996–2008 pre-crisis and 2008–15 crisis periods. Dynamic multifactor partitioning confirms that in Italy, all typologies of co-operatives withstood the crisis better than other business forms did and that co-operatives were affected the least by economic cyclicality and employment loss.

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合作企业反周期与经济危机：意大利就业动态的比较分析

理论和实证文献报道，工人合作社比投资者拥有的公司 (IOF) 更好地保护就业，尤其是在经济低迷时期。本文介绍了一个新假设，即不仅工人合作社而且所有合作社类型（例如工人、生产者、消费者、信贷）都比 IOF 更好地保护就业，因为它们都满足其成员的需求——而不是最大化股东价值——通过提供稳定的商品和服务流。需求满足的长期模式意味着持续的活动和就业。为了从理论上证实我们的假设，我们求助于公司作为问题解决者的进化解释和关于组织弹性的文献。我们使用意大利统计研究所发布的所有意大利企业在 1996-2008 年危机前和 2008-15 年危机期间的数据来检验该假设。动态多因素划分证实，在意大利，所有类型的合作社都比其他商业形式更好地抵御了危机，并且合作社受经济周期性和就业损失的影响最小。