Call for Papers

Reclaiming the Economy: the Role of Cooperative Enterprise, Ownership and Control

An International Conference on Cooperative Forms of Organisation

Joint Sponsors:

Welsh Institute for Research into Cooperatives, UWIC Business School, UK Society for Cooperative Studies, OU Cooperatives Research Unit, Cooperative College, Cooperatives-UK, and the Collective, for Alternative Organisation Studies, Leicester University.

Venue:

Cynoced Campus, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, 6-8 September, 2006.

Aim:

This international conference is designed to explore the profile of cooperative forms of organisation with a view to establishing a multidisciplinary research agenda which serves the mutual interests of both academics and practitioners. All forms of mutual and cooperative activity are included, ranging from worker to retail cooperatives as well as community businesses and social enterprises.

To this end, we invite submissions from academics, co-operators, managers and policy makers with either a practical or research interest in co-operative organisation. With such a range of perspectives, we anticipate that the various contributions will reflect a mix of international, national and local experience about both the social practice of co-operation and the theoretical concerns which inform such practices.

Rationale:

Alongside globalisation, the enterprise culture and the stakeholder economy, there is increasing evidence that cooperative and mutual forms of enterprise are spreading and developing across the world. They take a wide variety of forms, cover an extensive range of socio-economic enterprises, organisations and activities and – in pursuit of mutualist objectives – are characterised by a bewildering array of organisational arrangements.

However, to some degree, they all draw on the long, diverse and rich history of cooperative thinking. As noted by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), cooperative values have a long history in cooperative practice. By insisting on developing more democratic structures and organisational practices, such values combine a radical challenge to neo-liberal economics and to the political domination of multinational corporations. However this radical core is often not fully recognised. In part, this is because cooperative values come under severe pressure over the longer term. Cooperatives invariably operate in a hostile socio-economic environment and maintaining a coherent direct challenge to the mainstream is not easy. At the same time, the example set by such organisations remains potent: new producer cooperatives continue to emerge and we have seen a resurgence of interest in cooperative initiatives in the social economy and social enterprise sector. Overall, the evidence indicates that cooperative enterprise remains a very significant source of socio-economic regeneration both nationally and internationally.

However, the real challenge to cooperative values lies not in establishing cooperative forms of organisation, but in creating long term and secure sources of ‘cooperative capital’, developing appropriate forms of co-operative management and establishing democratic governance mechanisms to ensure the long term survival of cooperatives as self-regenerating alternative forms of socio-economic activity. Analytically, at the centre of this challenge lie the age-old problems of ownership and control.

Conference Organisation:

The conference will combine plenary sessions with conventional academic presentations and ‘theory-practice’ workshops.

Academic Presentations:

The precise conference streams will emerge from submissions. However, we anticipate papers that will organize themselves within the following themes:

1. Institutional forms of cooperative organisation.
2. How cooperative ownership, governance and control regulate work, the economy and social activity.
3. The relationship between cooperatives and other sections of the social economy and/or multi-stakeholding forms of organisation.
4. Cooperatives’ relationship with the public and private sectors: is the mutualisation of the public sector a positive development?
5. Cooperative history and culture.
6. Cooperatives as a radical and/or international alternative social movement.
7. The link between cooperative organisation and ecological sustainability.

‘Theory-practice’ workshops:

To articulate a creative dialogue between academic, practitioner and policy-making perspectives we propose to include ‘theory-practice’ workshops which will be ‘practice-driven’. Again, the precise themes will emerge from submissions, but suitable topics might include:

1. Priorities for cooperative development over the next 10 – 20 years.
2. Cooperative management and governance, work organisation and trade unions
3. New directions: ethical consumption (fair trade, sustainability), the knowledge economy
4. Financing social enterprises and cooperatives
5. Cooperation in the ‘knowledge economy’.
6. Cooperatives and public services provision.
7. Developments in the retail cooperative sector and its supply chain
8. Co-operative Learning Methods, and a values approach to the Enterprise learning and Citizenship agendas in education

Submission Process:

All submissions and conference communications will be conducted by email. Papers are invited from academics, practitioners and/policy-makers on any of the foregoing topics. Prospective contributors should send an abstract of approx. 800 words to the conference organisers by 10th February 2006. Notification of acceptance will be given by 7th March 2006 and full papers are required by 30th June 2006.

Abstracts should be typed using double spacing and include:

• the title of the paper;
• the name(s), and affiliation(s) of the author(s) and,
• an author contact address, e-mail and telephone/fax number

Copies of submissions should be sent as an email attachment (saved as a Word document or a text file) to:
mscott-cato@uwic.ac.uk. If email is not available postal submissions may be sent to Molly Scott Cato, UWIC Business School, Colchester Avenue, Cardiff, CF23 9XR.

Publication

The conference proceedings will be published (with an ISBN) and available to participants at the Conference. The proceedings will contain the abstracts of the papers presented and the full versions of the papers will be provided on a CD as part of the conference pack.

It is anticipated that the Conference will result in a further publication(s) containing selected contributions from the conference.

Wales Institute for Research into Co-operatives

Wales’s first national research unit on the social economy was established in April 2000 with the aim of providing strategic and applied research covering all aspects of the social economy. It is based at the Business School of the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. For more information see our website: http://www.uwic.ac.uk/ubs/research/wirc/


Molly Scott Cato
Green Economist, Social Researcher, Homemaker
11 Prospect Street, Aberystwyth, SY231JJ
Tel. 01970-639316