Rod Bain, Juliette Summers (University of St Andrews, Scotland)

John McNamara, Sonja Novkovic, Ryzard Stocki (St Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada)

Co-operative (co-op) and community-owned enterprises (COE) can be understood as alternatives to dominant models of business ownership and control. We seek to explore, through the perspectives of these alternatives, whether they resist or reproduce the neoliberal consensus, and how and to what extent they challenge existing management and organisation theory.

Co-ops and COEs share a number of characteristics which include democratic decision-making and member ownership – and are also likely to include equality, equity, and not-for-private-profit. Members may be workers, consumers, or residents within a defined local area or property – they may be communities of place and/or communities of interest. 

On the one hand, community owned enterprises are a distinct and slowly expanding facet of society, to date largely under-analysed by scholars. They are active within several sectors, including land, forest and property management, renewable energy, retail, and leisure. The emergence of COEs may be partly attributed to the dominant consensus: they are manifestations of community empowerment aiming to locally strengthen civil society as sought by ‘roll-out’ neoliberal policies. COEs have been credited with generating various positive externalities for their communities. Enhanced local democracy, social cohesion and resilience, local economic development, and population stability or growth have all been observed in communities controlling local assets. However, these benefits are accompanied by challenges. Communities may lack people with the management skills or experience to govern trading organisations – however where there is a challenge there are creative responses.

Management issues unlikely to be encountered in traditional organisational ownership include aspects such as the reliance on volunteer managers and board members, who can get tired of often time- and energy-consuming work. Such issues may generate alternative and collective managerial responses from communities – responses that subvert and resist neoliberal market managerialism.

The cooperative movement, on the other hand, has for many years suffered from an isomorphism created by a lack of management models and ethics native to its economic movement. In 1995, the International Co-operative Alliance developed a definition of this economic model along with a set of ethics, values and principles. Over the last twenty years, co-op enterprises and their support organisations have worked to incorporate this new paradigm into their operations and governance. However, the co-op model does not, by itself, guarantee that the co-op identity flourishes, nor does co-operation automatically create a new managerial functionality. The development of a management model consistent with the promise of co-operation requires a consistent and conscious effort by management researchers, co-op leaders, and members. 

In this stream we do not seek to conflate models of co-op and community ownership, rather embrace their plurality. Both cooperatives and COEs trouble neoliberal discourse through communal asset ownership. Such ownership, particularly of land, challenges norms of enclosure and individual property ownership fundamental to modern liberal democracy. Thus, communities of place (COEs) or of interest (coops) controlling and benefitting from their own assets can become places of possibility, where alternative organising and managing practices are performed.

By viewing co-ops and COEs as alternative organisations, we open up a space to critique existing understandings of management, and to explore different organising and managing practices. We therefore invite papers addressing a range of issues, including (but not limited to):

Abstract submission (500 words) 31 January 2015 

Notification of acceptance 27 February 2015

Abstracts should be sent to: [log in to unmask] & [log in to unmask]

best,

Rod