The Co-Operative Model in Practice
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The Co-operative Model in Practice International perspectives Edited by Diarmuid McDonnell and Elizabeth Macknight The Co-operative Model in Practice: International perspectives A CETS Resource published with the support of the Scottish Government and the Economic and Social Research Council. The Co-operative Model in Practice is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Users are free to copy, distribute and transmit this work, as well as adapt it, as long as the following conditions are met: Attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial – You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. The Co-operative Model in Practice is open access, meaning it is free to download online. Copyright © Selection and editorial matter, Diarmuid McDonnell and Elizabeth Macknight The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. First published 2012 ISBN 978-0-9555342-3-2 The Co-operative Model in Practice: International perspectives Contents List of figures and tables ii Contributors iii Acknowledgements v Introduction – the co-operative model in practice 1 1. A different commonwealth: the co-operative movement in Scotland 3 2. Credit and community 19 3. The development of co-operatives in Slovenia 29 4. Sustaining the co-operative approach in an era of change: a case study from Cork, Ireland 41 5. The resilience of co-operative food networks: a case study from Stroud, England 53 6. A ‘member-owned business’ approach to the classification of co-operatives and mutuals 67 7. Hybrid tendencies in consumer co-operatives: the case of Sweden 83 8. New frontiers in democratic self-management 99 9. Assessing participation in worker co-operatives: from theory to practice 119 C0ntents i List of figures and tables Figure 1 – Scottish Co-operative Women’s Guild (Membership, 1893-1952) 8 Figure 2 – Manufacturing milk supply map of Ireland 45 Figure 3 – The competing ‘logics’ of Co-operative Associative Action 87 Figure 4 – A Meta-Theoretical Model of Co-operative Ownership 107 Figure 5 – General content of the CoopIndex Report – from detailed to general 130 Figure 6 – Dimensional summary of a sample CoopIndex Report 131 Table 1 – Co-operative Strength in Scotland, 1886, 1909 11 Table 2 – Statistics for dairy co-operatives in Cork, as of end 2009 46 Table 3 – Milk price league table position 50 Table 4 – The nine co-operative principles identified by GJ Holyoake 71 Table 5 – A suggested taxonomy of member-owned businesses 76 Table 6 – Development of Swedish Consumer Co-operatives, 1910–2010 88 Table 7 – The Camp Nou way 102 Table 8 – Privatisation, Socialisation and Nationalisation 103 Table 9 – Multi-stakeholder Model Rules for Co-operatives 110 Table 10 – An Analysis of Member Rights in the Case Studies 112 ii List of figures and tables Contributors James Beecher is currently undertaking a PhD research project at the Cardiff Institute for Co- operative Studies, based at UWIC (see www.uwic.ac.uk/cics). His research explores the resilience of mutual financial institutions in times of crisis. This includes assessment of whether UK building societies have been more resilient than UK stakeholder-owned banks to the recent financial crisis. Johnston Birchall studied at Oxford and then spent five years as a housing association manager before returning to academic life with an MA in Social Policy and a PhD at York University. For the last twenty-five years his focus has been on the subject of co-operation, more specifically in member-owned businesses (co-operatives, mutuals, and user-controlled public service agencies). He has been at the University of Stirling since 1999. Johnston has written several books (with translations into five other languages), his latest being People-centred Businesses: co-operatives, mutuals and the idea of membership (Macmillan, 2010). Recently has he has been advising UN agencies on co-operative responses to the global economic crisis. He has a Leverhulme Fellowship for 2012, and is using it to write a book on people-centred banking. Molly Scott Cato is Professor of Strategy and Sustainability at the University of Roehampton. She was previously Director of the Cardiff Institute for Co-operative Studies and has published widely on issues related to mutuality and co-operation. Molly is a green economist and is seeking to design and build an economy founded in social and ecological justice. Her new book, the The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness will be published by Earthscan in October 2012. Elizabeth Macknight is an Australian academic who lectures in European history at the University of Aberdeen. In 2009 she began to collaborate with Hugh Donnelly, Director of the Co-operative Education Trust Scotland (CETS). This led to a successful application for a Knowledge Transfer Partnership grant (2010-12) sponsored by the Scottish Government and the Economic and Social Research Council to promote understanding of co-operative, mutual and employee- owned business models within tertiary education. Catriona M M Macdonald is Reader in Late Modern Scottish History at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests lie in the social, cultural and political history of modern Scotland. Dr Macdonald’s principal publications include Whaur Extremes Meet: Scotland’s Twentieth Century (2009), which won the Saltire Society’s History Book of the Year Award in 2010; The Radical Thread: Political Change in Scotland, 1885–1924; Unionist Scotland (1998) and (with E.W. McFarland) Scotland and the Great War (1999). Olive McCarthy is a researcher in the Centre for Co-operative Studies and a lecturer in the Department of Food Business and Development, University College Cork. Her research interests include credit unions, community co-operatives and agricultural co-operatives. Olive is academic director of the MBS degree in Co-operative and Social Enterprise, offered by e-learning. Diarmuid McDonnell received his BBs in Information Systems in 2010 and is now a researcher on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) for the University of Aberdeen. Based in Glasgow, Diarmuid is working with the Co-operative Education Trust Scotland (CETS) to produce resource packs focusing on co-operative, mutual and employee-owned models of enterprise for use in higher education. Sonja Novkovic is Professor of Economics at Saint Mary’s University. Her research interests are in the field of labour-managed and co-operative firms, and comparative economics. She is focusing on evolutionary economics and learning via genetic algorithms, as tools of modelling adaptive economic agents. Dr Novkovic is also teaching in the Masters of Management for Cooperatives and Credit Unions (MMCCU) program at Saint Mary’s. She is a past president of the International Association for the Economics of Participation (IAFEP) and Vice President of the Canadian Association for Studies in Cooperation (CASC). Contributors iii Tony O’Rourke has taught banking, finance and capital markets in a number of universities in the British Isles and in countries in Central and Eastern Europe. His interests are in financial mutuals and financial co-operatives as strong engines of change in banking practice and operations. He also has a keen involvement in local and regional development of entrepreneurship using mutual models in Central and South East Europe and is co-author of a book on entrepreneurship in transition economies. Tony is currently looking at issues concerned with the financial crisis and how bankers failed to learn the lessons apparent from the Scandinavian banking crisis in the 1990s as well as acting as the advisor for an MBA programme at a university in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Victor A. Pestoff received his B.A. in Political Science from California State University at Long Beach (US) and defended his PhD in political science at Stockholm University (Sweden) in 1977. He taught at Stockholm University for nearly twenty years: six years at the Department of Political Science and thirteen years at the School of Business. He became a Research Associate at Helsinki University (Finland) in 1988 and was a Research Fellow at Kanasawa University (Japan) in 1998. In the mid-1990s he joined the faculty of the newly opened Södertörns högskola (Sweden) and became a Professor of Political Science. He was appointed Full Professor of Political Science at Mid-Sweden University in Östersund (Sweden), in 2002 and retired in 2008. He is Professor Emeritus in Political Science and currently Guest Professor at the Institute for Civil Society Studies at Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm (Sweden). Piotr Prokopowicz is a researcher, lecturer and organisational development consultant. He holds a PhD in Sociology and master’s degree in Psychology from Jagiellonian University. In his research and consulting, he focuses on helping organisations in reaching their maximum potential through participation, transparency and evidence-based management. A member of the International Sociological Association, he co-authored Total Participation Management, a book on participative management practices, and was a part of the team that developed the Co-op Index, a tool for assessing co-operative values and principles. Rory Ridley-Duff worked for over a decade in a worker co-operative that was a co-founder of Social Enterprise London. He is now course leader for the MSc Co-operative and Social Enterprise Management degree at Sheffield Business School and a board member of both Co-operatives Yorkshire and Humber and Social Enterprise Yorkshire and Humber.