He looks at cooperatives and employee ownership from the standpoint of contracting costs. In some situations the contracting costs are high and ownership costs low. In others it's reversed. What tends to make employee ownership costly is a broad divergence of opinion about what the firm does. If one group is homogeneous then that group has a good chance of getting the decision rights and will contract with others for the remaining work.
Employee ownership seems to works well for taxi cab drivers.
Plywood co-ops hire managers. Attorney's become partners but secretaries don't. The more variance at work, the less likely a firm is to be employee owned. UPS , for example, is employee owned, mostly by management. They let the rank and file in two or three years ago but they haven't accumulated enough to represent a significant block.