This doctoral dissertation by Jeremias Meyer explores how the introduction of AI-supported member participation shapes the relationships between members, board members and management in the context of cooperative governance.
It focuses on online focus groups of members, to identify shared challenges and joint opportunities where cooperatives could provide additional member value. These focus groups will take place in the form of videocalls, and speech-to-text transcription and large language models will be used for summarizing participants’ discussions. The AI-generated summaries will be shared with governance bodies (boards, executive directors) and feed into the design of consecutive rounds of focus groups. The goal is to enable a richer and deeper form of member engagement that is not resource intensive.
The study adopts a multiple-case study design involving five Austrian cooperatives with over 100 members, composed of companies or self-employed individuals. Four cooperatives will undergo the AI-supported participatory intervention, while one serves as a control case. The research combines qualitative (interviews, document analysis) and quantitative (surveys, panel data) methods to analyze both the process and outcomes of the intervention.
Theoretically, the project is grounded in new institutional economics, to understand how AI alters information flows, decision-making, and actor relations. The study aims to contribute to both the theory of cooperative governance and the practical understanding of AI’s role in participatory organizational practices.