USD President's Report and Honor Roll of Donors 1996

area of interest, including engineering, business and community development, elementary and secondary education and MCC's social security program. Abascal-Hildebrand , co-director of USD's leadership studies program, notes that even as successful as MCC has become , its managers still frequ ently feel isolated from the rest of the workers once promoted to the higher ranks of the company. "In cooperatives, the social dimension is often eas ier to accomplish, but the participative governance is much more difficult," she says. 'This is what intrigues us from our leader- ship studies program perspective because of the interest we have in socially responsible leadership. It's a marvelous oppor- tunity for our students to see that a complicated, sophisticated, humane organization can also admit it still needs to know more about leadership and management." Armed with firsthand knowledge of MCC, the USD students returned to write comparative studies of the Spanish cooperative and an organization of their choice. One student is carrying on her work and introducing some of the MCC concepts to co-workers within San Diego community mental health programs. Another is taking the concepts he learned about cooperative education to the South County high school where he is a teacher. Abascal-Hildebrand is brimming with ideas to expand the study of MCC to include School of Business Administration faculty and students, and to take the cooperative concept into the Linda Vista neighborhood and help res idents create a preschoo l and child care center. The Schoo l of Education is particularly interested in con- tinuing an exchange program with the cooperative and its new University of Mondragon, the professor notes, because MCC is preparing to add a leadership program to its degree offerings. "There are tremendous opportunities for USD students and faculty members through future exchanges," Abascal- Hildebrand says.

STUDY A BROAD When Mary Abascal-Hildebrand assigns a research project to her leadership studies students, she does more than point them toward the library. This summer, the School of Education assoc iate professor traveled with 18 graduate students to Mondragon, Spain, where fo r 11 days they immersed them- se lves in the Basque culture and studied a unique worker coop- erative system. Abascal-Hildebrand learned of this vast complex of worker-owned factories, fin ancial institutions and schools in early 1995, her first year at USD. She included the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation as one of several examples to explore in a summer doctoral course on organizational change . But soon she was so fascinated by the unique co-op that she began to formulate a plan fo r a seminar course the following summer to study MCC exclusively. Part of that plan included winning a grant from the USD Internationalizing Committee to visit Spain and study MCC firsthand, prior to taking students there. THE SEARCH FOR H UMAN DIGNITY Surrounded by mountainous terra in in Spain's northern Basque country, Mondragon is a small town of 30,000 residents; 26,000 of whom work as MCC members. The cooperative was founded 40 years ago by fiv e young engineers. They were inspired by a Catholic priest who believed knowledge is power and that human dignity is bound to the right of decent employment. Today, MCC boasts 96 separate entities, including facto- ries that manufac ture household appliances and machine too ls, elementary and secondary schools, banks, and research and development laboratories. The worker-owners make up the management groups, earn better-than-average wages and own stock in the highly successful cooperative. MCC has never laid off an employee because it believes in educating its members in response to advances in the workplace. The MCC motto - "Our labor gives birth to virtue and our virtue gives birth to honor" - guides the daily work of each member. C OOPERATI VE L EARN ING Spurred by curios ity to learn if life in the co-op is as ideal as it sounds, and to discover practical leadership skills that might be implemented back home, the USD group spent mornings in one of MCC's tra ining facilities talking with workers and managers from different companies within the system. In the afternoon , they visited the factories, banks, schools and health care fac ilities. Each student went to Mondragon with a special

Worker cooperatives and employee--owned businesses are hardly new concepts to researchers familiar with economic trends or organizational leadership. But the extraordinary success of a 26,000--member cooperative corporation in Mondragon, Spain, has captured the attention of Mary Abascal--Hildebrand, associate professor in the School of Education. She and 18 students traveled to Europe in June for an intensive study of the 40--year--old corporation and returned overflowing with ideas to put the unique management and leadership concepts to use.