Co-ops and Social Enterprise - discuss

That is also my experience Bob, but I see it as a problem in an organisation that seeks to evolve and be accountable to its members. I'm a great believer in self-organisation (do-ocracy) where groups of people come together, negotiate as they work and get on with the job - I saw it work many times in direct action camps and free festivals.

However, once the "Rules/Culture" have been negotiated, it's worth writing them down so:
* new people can refer to them
* they can quickly resolve disputes
* they can prevent the same conversation happening every year
* the Rules can adapt to change in a way that is agreed across the organisation and is known across the organisation.

It's also worth introducing new people to how stuff works - the internal governance. My experience as a new member at a large worker co-operative, many years ago now, was that I had to absorb how things worked by osmosis. I never really understood the governance properly (despite engaging with it) until I left; at which point I became quite a fan of the way it was organised. What was missing at the time was a link between how members thought it worked and how it actually worked.

There's an important balance to be struck between what we might call the cultural governance and the formal governance - the "Rules". I've been into many co-ops (not just worker co-ops) over the years where there is some form of block or crisis and I have often been able to help resolve that simply by pointing out that the Co-ops Rules have anticipated such a situation and "this is what your Rules say to do" - smiles all round and either "oh that makes sense" or "no that's not what we want to do" and so we work with the co-op and change the Rules. It has been my repeated experience that these crises arise in the vacuums where people aren't sure what should happen and fill that vacuum with "custom and practice" or their own guesses around "natural justice", or "what x told me".

Whatever the game you are playing, it's useful to have a rudimentary knowledge of the Rules. The Loomio platform we're using was created to facilitate large numbers of Occupy activists to come together and agree a written manifesto.

Rory,

CAN (as in Co-operative Assistance Network Limited) was registered in 1989 as the first non-geographical co-operative development agency in the country. You may be confusing us with different organisation with a similar acronym (not that that makes any difference to any definitions). Our founder members were experienced co-operators, they knew what they were doing and what they were talking about, our current members even more so.

Hi Bob,

Societies Rules don't have to assume a heirachy. We have managed
to get rules passed the FCA that have no board and are managed by
general meeting, using consensus apart from the rare occasion when
you have to vote. RRFM14 does exactly that.

The view we have forced the FCA to have is that, the law specifies
that your rules must include provisions for the make up of the
board "if you have a board", but not that you must have a board.

I only know of a set of housing co-op society rules and worker
co-op company rules that are managed by general meeting, but we
could write a non-heirachical set of worker co-op society rules if
we wanted.

cheers

Andy

Hi @fairshares I think you have have confused CAN the worker co-op (I was once a member) formed in 1989 - and short for Cooperative Assistance Network - with CAN the social enterprise mob, managing lots of assets and funds, formed in 1998 :slight_smile:

Thank you both - you are right, I thought CAN stood for Community Action Network. Tell me more about the Cooperative Assistance Network. FairShares is not geographical either (we have around 170 on a Loomio group members from all over the globe now, and 1,400 on our mailing list - all built through word of mouth contact). Most activity, however is offline in specific enterprises creating infrastructure or local pilot projects and networks in the UK, Croatia (3 locations), Germany (2 locations) Hungary and Netherlands, with further (university-led) funding to link to sub-Saharan African universities. There are early adopters (actual enterprises) also in the USA, Canada, Ireland and Malta.

We’re consolidating contacts from different supporting organisations and now have a Hubspot database of around 5000 that will need several months to clean properly (with the goals of sharing it with members as a commons resource).

How can we work effectively together?

Thanks for that, Rory, however, I never done a PhD and I find your suggestion that I have been "steered away" from anything quite unwarranted. In my working life I have been involved in the co-operative movement since the seventies and am familiar with the debates which have been going on for decades, even before then.

Fabian - the comment was based of what you concluded from your degree programme, and was directly at your course, not you. Did your tutors use, or recommend, my textbook (it has been adopted by more than 50 universities worldwide)? It starts with an analysis of the Mondragon Cooperatives as an exemplar social enterprise, and has extensive discussions of employee ownership, cooperatives such as Loomio, as well as associations, social business, charitable trading and the FairShares Model. It is the most coop friendly textbook on social enterprise by far, and also the most widely adopted worldwide (about to go into its third edition). Your tutors recognition of coops (or not) as social enterprises would be indicated by the materials they directed you to use. What did they use as a core text, and where did you study social enterprise?

Some co-ops are social enterprises, some social enterprises are co-ops. I work with social enterprises as well as co-ops. This means that the social enterprise clients or training participants I work with get to hear about demoractic stakeholder controlled social enterprises, based on co-op principles which can make a difference to their choices about how to grow and develop. Some choose co-op. Most of the money thrown at social enterprises focuses on a narrative of heroic sole entrepreneur saving the world (and if you think that is bad you should see some of the bullshit that is spread about Societies by people who don't understand the legal form such as Young Foundation and UnLtd). If we don't counter that narrative we miss an opportunity. Some people were looking to set up a co-op in the first place but the well paid flashy social enterprise salespeople rushed them past the idea "nothing to see hear". I see the wider social enterprise world as a partially receptive audience to our ideas. IMO we should engage as much as we as individuals want to, but on no account should we water down how we define co-ops, which some are guilty of to appease the social enterprise world. (I once berated a representative of a CDA describing a small member CIC who rejected my suggestion to open up membership as being "like a co-op").

I am sorry, Rory, but I do not follow your line of reasoning. My degree programme was aimed at mature students with experience in the third sector, and one of the opening exercises was to look at how the accumulated experience of all the students was about 10 times that of the course leader. Unlike the top-down approach which I had previously experienced a long time ago in academia, we were encouraged to think for ourselves and develop our research skills. The posting I made arose as much from my awareness gained outside the course as from what we learnt during the course.
I am afraid I can't help feeing your repeated attempts to promote your own books and focus suspicion on a rival offering a parallel educational experience smacks to much of the heroic entrepreneur espoused by Schumpeter, mentioned above, so I hope you will excuse me if I refrain from further developing this strand of the thread

An interesting dialogue. I think on the history aspects what you say Rory is acceptable. I think the deeper point Bob and Sion stressed was on the failure of the typological consideration of social enterprise forms to consider the history and origins of collective mutual aid. This is what is missing today. Both this awareness of the cultural roots of resistance to laissez-faire economics (always the Tory agenda in one form or another) and how hegemonic market fundamentalist thinking is. This article by Ganz on why Social Enterprise is not Social Change talks to this fundamental issue.

https://keough.nd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/SSIR-Spring_2018_social_enterpise_is_not_social_change.pdf