Co-ops and Social Enterprise - discuss

Thanks Bob. This really is a fascinating subject. Based upon experience, my knee-jerk reaction to any 'social enterprise' is suspicion as to the real motivation, as opposed to what it says in the mission statement. Much like so many charities, social enterprises can very often, regardless of how well intended they may be, only serve to perpetuate the problem they seek to address. Of course there is a huge danger of over simplifaction here, but nonetheless, everything I have read over the last few days has reinforced my conviction that the coop sector will only flourish by accentuating & promoting its uniqueness & will suffer by passively allowing that uniqueness to be diluted by accepting that it sits comfortably under the social enterprise umbrella.

Well yes social enterprise includes some coops and on the continent social enterprises are usually coops in law or practice. This is an old argument now. But it illustrates why sticking to ICA principles is crucial.

I have some thirty years experience in this field. no room to describe it all here. It is not only from my life in worker coops. Im interested in the practical application of laws and principles and not as much in academic classification or theory.

There is a distinction between US/UK style social entrepreneurships and cooperative or democratic social enterprise. This is much clearer in european circles than here in the US infected UK. There was a fear of social entrepreneurship capturing the minds of the European Commission in preference to cooperative social enterprise or coops (as happened with New Labour.) I was able to divert the thinking of the commission along with Italian comrades back onto the coop path (to the anger of the British government of the time). In those presentations I stressed the democratic governance dimension, and its lack in most definitions of social enterprise.

In many countries eg Germany, coop law is so restrictive that new starts often opt for another legal structure and call themselves social enterprises instead. Americans get even more confused. They have 47 variations on coop law. Its just easier to be a generic 'non profit'. But that means there is no control over the most important quality of coops/social enterprises, democratic control by their members, users and workers.

Social enterprise is a badly defined term if you look at it using the dimension of democratic control. Seemingly identical SocEnts eg HCT and ECT, can be effectively a consumer coop on one hand and chief exec and board dominated on the other. In European forums people agree. In the UK Soc Ent people dont want to know.

In the early days of Soc Ent in the UK it was democratic. John Pearce took the ideals of community business development plus the rigour of for profit business development and added democratic control by the beneficiaries, which was a radical departure from paternalistic charity and chaotic community businesses. (As a councillor I spent much of the late 80s closing down publicly funded community businesses that only benefited their leaders.)

And early Soc Ent conferences were full of enthusiastic activists eager to convert their local economies into democratic economies. It was an exciting New Cooperativism but it didnt last.

Without the rigour of ICA rules a definition of social enterprise was agreed with New Labour ministers from which democratic governance had been deleted. I protested at meetings with ministers and senior civil servants and realised they didnt care.

This enabled people like Liam Black to run furniture recycling projects pay himself a huge salary and play Mr. Social Enterprise UK because there was no democratic oversight. All over the UK voluntary sector managers who previously were paid local authority level wages turned their organisations into Soc Ents and the CIC legal form (a fraudsters charter in effect) enabled this, and paid themselves hugely inflated salaries. The activists disappeared from Soc Ent gatherings to be replaced by suited CEOs. My habitual presentation to Soc Ent conferences to 'sack your chief exec and do it yourself' was longer received with enthusiasm but sullen glares.

New Labour was at home with these people and threatened by radical cooperators. Patricia Hewitt, Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, I met all of them. As Cameron later said, Social Enterprise was highly paid jobs for the children of New Labour.

This is why social enterprise is a dangerous diversion (and why employee ownership is as well). Without the rigour of ICA principles (all of them, not pick and choose those that suit) the players, parasites and predators have always and will always easily divert public and collective capital into their own pockets.
If an enterprise is not democratically controlled by its beneficiaries, no matter what it is, it is part of the world we must undermine and replace if we are to survive.
Democracy, the best we can get, is everything.

a little over 15 years ago, when the UK government published it's first national strategy for social enterprise (and everyone started to get excited about this shiny new world), I was unsure where the overlaps/divergences might be with coops.
Rather than take a political, policy, legislative, legal structure, governance models approach, the one thing both seem to have in common is that they're both an incredibly diverse group with regards to all the above themes. However, my ideas was that they can be identified as a collective whole if we define them by their shared and defining values.

When you set them out side by side on this basis, with the sometimes exception of democratic control and accountability, there would seem to be more in common than difference?

Agreed, and something I always encourage (aka "The Manual") but I'd go further and say the Members themselves could write the plain language commentary. In doing so, they learn and understand their own Rules.

Which is what Radical Routes do with
it's rules RRFM14

Share that?

Principled cooperation is distinct from social enterprise and commercialised charity, because it’s a praxis of collective self-help. It’s closest cousins are worker unions, mutuals and and interest-based associations. As an ideology, social enterprise hangs entirely on neoliberalism’s project of social atomisation/dumping and deepening the penetration of markets into basic aspects of life.

We are totally fed up with this bollocks, misinformation and downright lying,

The Memorandum and Articles of Association of Social Enterprise London show that Calverts Press (who you worked for Sion) and Computercraft (who Rory Ridley-Duff worked for) were subscribers at its incorporation along with members of Poptel, and Several Cooperative Development Agencies (including Hackney, Camden).

We (worker coops) created the most influential UK social enterprise agency to fuel and develop cooperative and common ownership social ventures. It spawned the Social Enterprise Coalition (which was registered by the Cooperative Union) and created the Social Enterprise Journal.

Neoliberalism has certainly influenced changes in approaches to social enterprise policy in government circles, but this came later (about 5 years later). Social enterprise (in the UK) was a challenge to neoliberalism, not inspired by it. These are the facts in the ground however much you want to rewrite history to distance cooperatives from the outcome.

Please be honest about this history and stop misleading people about the cooperative connection to the UK social enterprise movement. You might wish to disown our history, but we do not because of the direct line in that history that opposed government imposed (neoliberal) solutions and led directly to the FairShares movement gathering supporters in many counties. Multi-stakeholder solidarity cooperatives are not instruments of neo-liberalism.

Ouch! I'm not sure this comment fits with the 'safe space' concept... or that the naming specific people is quite appropriate without revealing who the individual writing as @fairshares is... ? Perhaps you might like to identify yourself?

I'm clearly less informed about the specific history of SE vs Co-op but agree with the sentiment that any self-proclaimed social enterprise can make itself look and sound like it's doing something cooperative / collaborative / sustainable / good for the planet whilst actually acting exactly like a hardcore neoliberal extractive corporation.

AFAIK there are no specific principles that a SE must subscribe to / can be judged against, wheres co-ops have very specific and long-standing principles, which makes them superior in terms of ethics, accountability and also as a vehicle for encouraging a more equitable world. SEs, on the other hand, I see as fairly useless in this respect. I'd also classify B Corps in the same, fairly useless, category.

Here's hoping the conversation can stick to productive debate going forward ;)

HNY all.

Oli

I own my involvement (and that of Calverts, and others in the coop movement) in helping legitimise ‘social enterprise’ in the late 90s, even if many of us, with hindsight, realise we fucked up massively. It seemed smart at the time, but not everyone was taken in even then. Neoliberalism had been in the ascendant for 15 years, and New Labour was a paid-up passenger on the bandwagon. We were acting from a place of weakness. I don’t blame coops for identifying as social enterprises when it suits them; also, of course, some community businesses identifying as social enterprises are more democratic, open, inclusive or independent than some coops. Some of my best friends call themselves social entrepreneurs. But social enterprise, as it manifested in the UK, mystified both the problem and the remedy, and if you’re not earning from that, you’re paying for it. That’s the truth. 😜