Co-operative Membership and Globalization: Creating Social Cohesion through Market Relations
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Strategic Themes grant award - March 2002
Dr. Brett Fairbairn's remarks to press
Co-investigators and partner organizations
Co-operative Membership and Globalization (website)
Summary of Proposed Research
This project will produce better understanding of how voluntary membership choices by Canadians can change their communities and contribute to social cohesion and economic development. Researchers and community partners will create and disseminate new knowledge about membership in one of Canada's largest groupings of associations, co-operatives, and how it contributes to communities. This research will demonstrate how globalization influences existing organizations and communities and creates opportunities for new connections and identities. It will document the experiences of members and the strategies and responses of organizations, in order to provide valuable information and public policy proposals for community leaders, concerned citizens, policy-makers, and those interested in understanding the relationships between social cohesion and economic development.
Recent research has demonstrated that while economic development changes and sometimes destabilizes communities, it also appears that community cohesion is a necessary prerequisite for effective economic development. In other words, markets and cohesive communities are co-dependent. Creating, sustaining, and reconstituting social cohesion alongside and through market relations is a key challenge for citizens and leaders.
Social cohesion is about membership: citizenship in a state, residency in a geographic community, participation in a network or a culture. Co-operatives are a microcosm of this phenomenon, containing many of the political, social, and economic elements that are found in the larger society. People who join co-operatives are assuming both obligations and rights, are entering a community of both owners and customers, a situation analogous to citizenship in a political community. Understanding the role, the tensions, and the successes of membership in co-operatives is significant for understanding the processes of social cohesion in a successful market society.
This project examines these questions by focusing on membership in co-operatives as a question of identities: the self-conceptions of the members and of the co-operative, the shared identities among members and sub-groups, the overlaps with wider and external community identities, and the relationships and communication processes within with identities are constructed. A shared sense of identity is a form of social capital that can enable group action on common needs and aspirations. For research purposes, we will investigate a series of propositions. First: co-operatives will experience changing patterns of cohesion, resulting from globalization, in the form of apparently increasing differentiation among their members and weakening member loyalty. Second, co-operatives will succeed economically to the extent that they can use and generate social cohesion. Third, pursuit of economic viability will push co-operatives to bridge the boundaries of tightly knit communities and articulate looser and wider community identities &endash; another important form of social cohesion. Fourth, where there is a balance between intensive and extensive (bonding and bridging) membership functions, the results will be greater financial success for the co-operative as well as greater social cohesion and prosperity in the surrounding community.
These propositions will be tested in case studies that combine profiles of co-operatives and their communities with analysis of their culture and communications, and with direct study of the experience of members through surveys and focus groups. Researchers, research sites, and partner enterprises and federations from Halifax to Victoria to Nunavut will participate actively in collaborative interdisciplinary research. Studies will be integrated into four thematic clusters dealing with different types of communities: co-operative consumer identities in urban communities; co-operative membership and the changing boundaries of community, focusing on regionalization in rural areas;
co-operatives and Aboriginal cultures, looking at barriers, success stories, and the ways in which co-operatives can contribute to Aboriginal economic development; and, finally, the co-operative use of information technologies, notably the Internet, to create new kinds of communities.