Organizational Democracy Revisited: A Case Study of Governance Innovations in a Platform Cooperative Facing Global Scale and Member Heterogeneity

Scaling and member heterogeneity have often been linked to governance failures in cooperatives, yet newly emerging platform cooperatives may hold the potential to overcome this challenge. To assess innovative approaches to cooperative governance, the study proposes that organizational democracy needs to be understood as a multidimensional concept. Using the case study of Honeypot, a platform cooperative of online sex workers, it is found that representative, participative, and deliberative dimensions of organizational democracy are sustained. In contrast, Honeypot is struggling with liberal, social, and autonomous dimensions of organizational democracy. The research contributes to a better understanding of governance innovations in cooperatives by emphasizing that a narrow focus on innovating decision-making processes is insufficient to retain organizational democracy under conditions of global scale and member heterogeneity. In particular, more attention is needed for how cooperatives could innovate their capabilities to generate desirable outcomes and prevent undesirable outcomes for remote and diverse members.