Contact
Biography
Cian McMahon is Lecturer in Cooperative/Democratic Management and Organisation in the School of Business. He previously studied inclusive governance regimes across various scales as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Associate with the International Centre for Co-operative Management (ICCM) at Saint Mary’s University (SMU) Halifax, and with the Trinity College Dublin (TCD) Geography Department. Prior to this, he completed his PhD in Economics on the topic of sustainable worker cooperative development at the University of Galway in Ireland, where he also taught courses on heterodox economics and radical political economy.
Dr McMahon has published peer-reviewed articles in the Cambridge Journal of Economics; Economic and Industrial Democracy; Geopolitics; Review of Political Economy; Community Development Journal; Régulation Review: Capitalism, Institutions, Power; Journal of Co-operative Studies; New School Economics Review; and Review of International Co-operation. He is co-editor (with Sonja Novkovic and Karen Miner) of Humanistic Governance in Democratic Organizations: The Cooperative Difference (Palgrave [Open Access], 2023), and (with Terrence McDonough and David M. Kotz) the Handbook on Social Structure of Accumulation Theory (Edward Elgar, 2021). Cian worked previously as a Policy Analyst with the Irish progressive left Think-tank for Action on Social Change (TASC), and he values broader involvement with labour, cooperative, and community activist education.
Research
Cian’s research engages cooperative development practitioners in the elaboration of ‘real-world’ organisational theory. Primarily a qualitative researcher, he also values quantitative and mixed methods approaches. He has published in the fields of economic democracy, humanistic management, social and solidarity economy, community development, heterodox economics, geopolitics, economic inequality, care ethics, and social ecology.
Recent and current research focuses on union-cooperative collaborations and conflicts; humanistic worker and solidarity/multistakeholder co-op governance; long swings/stages in capitalist/cooperative growth and crisis; and transnational governance of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in development cooperation civil society spaces. He is increasingly interested in democratic forms of broad-based employee ownership; Community Wealth Building (CWB) through union co-ops; cooperatives as engines of international (sustainable) development; as well as cultural political economy and critical realism.
He has served as peer reviewer on article submissions for the Scandinavian Journal of Management; Review of Social Economy; Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity; Sociology Compass; Community Development Journal; and Journal of Co-operative Organization and Management. He has also peer reviewed book proposal submissions for Routledge and De Gruyter Brill.
Cian was awarded a Patrick J. McGovern Fellowship from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR), to research the role of labour unions in improved governance of worker-run cooperative firms.
Teaching
Dr McMahon adopts a research-led approach to teaching, drawing upon theoretical and case study research to engage students/practitioners in knowledge co-creation and co-learning. Cooperative values and principles are applied to relational conversations in the learning environment. Cooperative/democratic organisational alternatives are communicated, discussed, and debated through a critical political economy lens. Humanistic and cooperativist organisational approaches bridge the theory and practice of democratic member-based organisations (DMOs) in local, regional, and inter/national spaces.