James Kennedy

Among his many other accomplishments, Sir Horace Plunkett was the founder of the Irish cooperative organization movement, and 2004 marks the centenary of the publication of his landmark work Ireland in the New Century (Plunkett, 1904). Unfortunately, as influential as Plunkett was at the turn of the twentieth century, he is largely forgotten today. Yet, Plunkett's ideas on cooperative organizations as instruments of both commercial success and social good may serve to remind business and society scholars that alternative models of business organization have long existed and have been, from time to time, successful. His philosophy of cooperative organization further suggests that "stakeholder theory" was a practice long before it was anything approaching theory.