The Mondragon cooperative group of the Basque Country of northern Spain is considered one of the most successful examples of cooperative enterprise in the world, with annual sales of over €16 billion. But substantial cultural and economic changes have taken place since the cooperatives’ founding era, and this paper addresses a crucially important debate underway in Mondragon about whether satisfaction with ownership arrangements is now significantly lower among younger workers than among their older colleagues. The study presented here examines the relationship between “age” and “satisfaction with cooperative ownership” in Mondragon, a topic with enormous implications for the future of the large and growing number of cooperative or substantially employee-owned firms over ten years old around the world, and a topic that is virtually unaddressed in the scientific literature on co-ownership.

Two areas of the social science literature are explored. In the first area, we find that worker-owners often evaluate joint ownership positively, but not infrequently they have very mixed attitudes. Research also suggests the degree of fulfillment of employee-owners’ expectations of ownership and management is closely associated with ownership satisfaction. Research in the second area, on age and generational change in organizations and society, suggests age is an important variable to consider in this context.

This study examines questionnaire data from a sample of 2679 workers from an industrial cooperative in the Mondragon group. Multiple regression analyses of “age” and “cooperative ownership satisfaction” are carried out, controlling for several “employee characteristic” variables and “perceptions of management” variables.

Results are varied. In simple models, older workers are more satisfied with ownership. When controlling for other variables, younger workers are more satisfied, but differences are modest in both cases. We conclude that age is a relatively unimportant variable; management and governance practices dominate as predictors of ownership satisfaction. The practical and scientific importance of the results is considered.

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