Theorising the Rise and Fall of Member-owned Businesses

Organisations are difficult to understand. They are comprised of people yet they survive even when the people within them change. They are a collective endeavour but in legal terms have the status of an individual ‘person’. Metaphors such as a machine or an organism are both useful depending on what aspects of an organisation we want to see, but no one metaphor seems to capture it all. We need to be able to look at it in different ways; it has hard features such as structures and systems, soft features such as shared norms and values, overt features such as organisational charts and hidden features such as habits and routines. If we are to understand MOBs, we need to look at internal processes such as the relationships that exist between owners, managers and board members that determine their governance. We need to look at external processes such as the networks that exist between MOBs, or the regulatory environment a particular type of MOB finds itself in.