UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Jerome Warren obtained his PhD in economics from the University of Cologne in Germany, achieving high honors (magna cum laude). He has researched and published on the cooperative ecosystem of Italy, focusing on the emergence there of a distinct class of multi-stakeholder cooperatives in the form of social and community cooperatives. Beyond this, he served as lead editor of two volumes from Routledge on cooperative economics. The first of these, the Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics & Management, is available in an Open Access format. The second, entitled Global Cooperative Economics & Movements, will be published by Routledge in 2025.

He is currently involved with the EU Horizon project BioFairNet. He is founder and chairperson of both the Rudolf Rocker Institute and the German Institute for Economic Democracy. Previously, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, he led a chair established by the Belgian sovereign wealth fund, SFPI, to advise on developing a sustainable view of the firm, encompassing both ecological and social dimensions.

Since completing his Master's degree, Jerome Warren has been working on a research project on the relationship between democracy and the economy, for which he has already undertaken several research trips abroad, for example to Italy and Argentina.  Mr. Warren's dissertation intends to use a Polanyian transformational lens to view the domain of multi-stakeholder organization as a solution for a number of interrelated issues. It is interested firstly in an institutional and evolutionary analysis of democracy, attempting to answer the question of economic democracy’s place and interpreting the interractions between our assumptions of rationality and their effects on our predictions of human behavior, particularly with regards to pro-sociality. Secondly, it aims to develop an organizational model that moves beyond the restrictive notions inherent in contemporary organizational theory, and particularly the theory of the firm. It attempts do this by drawing on research by Hansmann, Dow, Borzaga, Sacchetti and others. The research then attempt to address some potential issues arising from the multi-stakeholder model by implementing some case studies employing sortition, or lottery, in selecting managers in organizations. It also attempts applying the prior analysis to the platform economy, seeking to apply the Polanyian lens to the phenomenon of data, and suggesting a shift from platform capitalism to a form of multi-stakeholder platform cooperativism as a solution to the problems addressed. A comparative study of international legislation regarding MSCs is then carried out in a final chapter.

Jerome Warren is a member of the International Karl Polanyi Society and is involved in several associations and initiatives, e.g. Exploring Economics, the Initiative of Critical Economists in Siegen, the Tax Justice Network, Pluralist Economists, e.V. and others. He is also a trained painter, musician (guitar) and travel photographer. His photos, paintings and writings can also be viewed on his website adornomarcuse.de. He lives in Frankfurt am Main.