Until early 2020, the major challenge for communities was mostly due to the effects of globalization and austerity on local economies, and the wave of boomer-generation business owners of SMEs nearing retirement. Both of these scenarios still persist. By the second quarter of 2020, the challenges became more severe as the socio-economic ills caused by COVID-19 risked the permanent loss of half of the world’s jobs and many of its SMEs, which were only saved from further distress due to state interventions and safety nets (ILO, 2020). Moreover, a rising crunch of businesses with succession issues due to the massive retirement of baby boomers in the global North has been adding to the crisis of business continuity in recent years. In Canada and the US, for instance, roughly three-quarters of retirement-aged owners do not have a succession plan, risking the socio-economic wellbeing of communities, in Canada potentially affecting one third of the private sector workforce (Bruce & Wong, 2012; CBC, 2011; ISED, 2016; Israelson, 2017; Parkinson et al., 2015). At the same time, in Southern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa, lingering socio-economic crises, neoliberal austerity, or cheaper labour elsewhere have been contributing to stubbornly high unemployment rates, waves of business shutdowns, and growing socio-economic displacement.  

In light of these increasingly chronic crises augmented by the crises of inequality and the environment compounded by the global capitalist system, one option, deployed in different parts of the world for saving either healthy firms with generational transfer issues or failing firms (including their jobs and the local economies they impact), are business conversions to cooperatives (BCCs). BCCs include worker buyouts (WBOs), empresas recuperadas (worker-recuperated enterprises, WREs), and owner-led conversions that transform formerly conventional firms into worker cooperatives, multistakeholder and solidarity cooperatives, or other employee or community ownership models (Azzellini & Vieta, 2025; Cheney et al., 2023; Jensen, 2011; Lingane & Rieger, 2015; Quarter & Brown, 1992; Vieta, 2020a, b; Vieta et al., 2017). The handful of BCC studies that currently exist are beginning to show that they save jobs and preserve the productive capacities of communities (Sanchez Bajo & Roelants, 2011; Vieta et al., 2017; Vieta, 2019; 2020a, b; Zevi et al., 2011), while some have even taken to addressing the ecological crisis head on by incorporating more sustainable production and products or services. 

In this talk, Marcelo Vieta, Chair of the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education and Associate Professor in the Program in Adult Education and Community Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, will review interdisciplinary and collaborative research he has been engaged with since 2005 in Argentina, Italy, and Canada documenting and critically analyzing the possibilities and challenges of business conversion to cooperatives (BCCs), with a particular focus on how they are prefiguratively suggesting promising pathways through and out of our conjuncture of local and global crises.