The cooperative form of organizing is sometimes called “the invisible giant” because of the scant public attention it receives, despite its immense reach across the global economy.
The International Cooperative Alliance estimates that 280 million people – or about 10% of the world’s working population – are employed by co-ops. Collectively, the world’s three million cooperatives claim 12% of humanity as members. In 2023, the largest 300 cooperatives and mutuals together generated US$2.8 trillion in revenue, according to the World Cooperative Monitor.
But education for cooperative governance is not commensurate with the influence of co-ops. A study published in March highlighted the relative absence of cooperative education at business schools, not to mention in management and economics textbooks. The authors found that “the single most important non-mainstream business model, the co-op enterprise, is currently absent in most business schools most of the time.”
“You can do your MBA and never hear about co-ops,” says Daniel Brunette, a senior director at Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. The national association has done exercises around getting more co-op education in Canada, but setting up new academic programs at universities is a long, arduous undertaking. The only full graduate degrees offered in Canada are the master’s and graduate diplomas of management for co-operatives and credit unions at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia. Other schools allow students to specialize in cooperatives.
Even in Quebec, which has the most developed cooperative culture in Canada and whose 3,000 co-ops represent some 14% of the province’s economy, many business schools barely mention them, says Rafael Ziegler, a specialist in sustainability management and the director of the Institut international des coopératives Alphonse-et-Dorimène-Desjardins (IICADD) at the graduate business school of the Université de Montréal.
The institute is home to the Portail Co-op, an online library devoted to cooperatives and mutuals, which was developed in part to help address the paucity of cooperative education.
A one-of-a-kind archive
Alphonse Desjardins, the godfather of the credit union movement in Canada, understood the importance of this kind of information-sharing. It was only through contacts in Europe that he came to understand the people’s savings and credit systems that were sweeping the continent in the late 19th century. And after establishing North America’s first credit union in Lévis, Quebec, in 1909, he spent much of the rest of his life explaining – in lectures, articles and letters – how the model could be adapted to different contexts to protect the interests of Quebec’s working and rural classes.
It is fitting that Portail Co-op was made possible by a donation from the Desjardins Group, which is now North America’s largest financial cooperative. Ziegler believes that, with its dedicated librarian and technician, the repository is the only one of its kind in the world.
At HEC (Hautes études commerciales) Montréal, where Ziegler teaches, the cooperative form is integrated into courses across the program, particularly as it relates to sustainability and the circular economy, subjects that attract significant interest. He sees this as an auspicious confluence, as the values of today’s students are increasingly aligned with those of cooperatives.
Part of the idea behind the Portail is to create an institutional memory for the cooperative movement; its technician spends much of her time digitalizing archival material, from photographs to newsletters to financial reports.
The library’s other function is to offer co-op members and researchers access to the widest possible array of relevant documents. The Portail covers 150 years of cooperative history, in 36 languages and from 84 countries.
Working together with Cooperatives and Mutuals Canada and the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation, the library curates thematic collections about issues and trends like climate change and digital services. “Obviously, we work as cooperatively as possible to distribute the library’s content,” Ziegler says.
Business schools should pay more attention to co-ops, Brunette says, because they breed resilience by their very nature. “The beauty and challenge of collective entrepreneurship is that you have to get people around the same table,” he says. “And that’s how you’ll weather the storms.”
Cooperatives are also much more territorially anchored, Ziegler points out, so they are unlikely to move elsewhere for a competitive advantage. In an era of escalating trade threats and multiplying crises, domestic rootedness is its own kind of asset.
Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto. Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.
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