20 March 2002 Press Conference
Remarks by Dr. Brett Fairbairn, Director Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan
I am delighted to be here to take part in announcing an exciting development in the history of our centre. To the best of our knowledge, the research project we are about to launch is the largest ever undertaken concerning Canadian co-operatives. With 15 co-investigators from 7 disciplines in 9 Canadian universities; some 20 community partners; a $589,000 grant from SSHRC toward a total budget of $2.2 million; this is truly a mammoth undertaking. To have such a project based here, in our centre and on this campus, is an honour.
This success is a team success. The strength of our project proposal was in no small part due to the many researchers and community partners who contributed to and supported it. Besides myself, our team includes half a dozen other academics from here at the U of S, plus other researchers and organizations from Halifax to Nunavut to Victoria, and indeed more widely in Britain, the United States, and Australia.
I want to acknowledge publicly the contributions of all of our team members, and particularly welcome our Saskatoon-based researchers, staff, and representatives of co-operatives who are with us today. A complete list of researchers and partner organizations is available on request.
I stress the team nature of our work because our centre is not in itself a large organization. For more than 15 years, we have developed here a focus on basic, conceptual research concerning co-operatives, linked to teaching, extension, and applied research. Undoubtedly this past work has provided a foundation for today's success. I think this is particularly true in two important respects: we have developed working interdisciplinary collaborations, and have cultivated connections with external communities.
I am convinced that our proposal is successful because it is highly interdisciplinary and based on unique university-community partnerships. Our project provides a model for "broadly based interdisciplinary team research" -- what SSHRC is looking for -- and SSHRC's reviewers rated our proposal first in Canada based largely on this strength.
Interdisciplinary research, in my view, is research that flows from a focus on concrete questions or problems: problems of practical concern to communities external to the academy; problems that go beyond what any one discipline can answer. In this case, co-operatives and their membership issues provide the focal point that defines our project, structures our team, and pulls in academics from seven disciplines.
Connected with this, our research will be a collaborative enterprise between university academics and community organizations. Partners such as co-ops will help frame the research, advise on methods, help conduct it, analyse results, disseminate findings, and put the findings into practice. They have an integral role in ensuring that the research is relevant and makes a difference.
It is no accident that such a project is based here, at the University of Saskatchewan. Our success reflects comparative advantages of our university as well as distinctive strengths of our province.
A recent article in the National Post highlighted the fact that Saskatchewan has the highest rates of voluntary participation by citizens of any province in the country. One form of that participation has long been involvement of Saskatchewan people in co-operatives. More than half of Saskatchewan households have memberships in credit unions and other co-ops.
Our centre exists here because the co-operative sector and the university formed a partnership, ultimately reaching back to the early years of the 20th century. The U of S, as is well known, was conceived as a "people's university" that would pursue the academic arts and sciences while serving the public. Our centre, founded in 1984, is a contemporary expression of that tradition and more specifically of the partnership between the co-operative movement and the university. I believe it is significant that our success announced today builds on other successes for the U of S such as in SSHRC's Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) program. "Community" is a strength of the U of S. Our links to the community are a source of academic excellence, a comparative advantage in relation to many other institutions.
Why study co-operatives and social cohesion?
First, co-operatives are not only important in Saskatchewan. They are present and active in every region of Canada. They are cornerstones of community and regional economies.
Second, co-operatives straddle the boundary between the market and the community. They are economic organizations formed by ordinary citizens to address economic challenges. They mediate the relationship between global economic trends and local needs and aspirations.
Third, co-ops are microcosms of society. In co-ops, citizens exercise democratic participation, work together with others, make choices about economic options, and experience or create social cohesion. John Ralston Saul has commented that, for modern democracies to function, citizens need to learn to think less like consumers and more like owners. This same tension is embodied on a daily basis in the experience of co-operatives. When people identify with a co-operative and feel ownership, cohesion is created in communities.
Social cohesion is about membership: citizenship in a state, residency in a geographic community, participation in a network or a culture. Our project aims to study membership as a matter of identities: by studying the ways in which members associate and feel part of shared identities by holding and practising co-operative membership. We aim to study member identities in the most direct possible ways, by talking to members themselves; and we also aim to study the context of membership, the co-operatives and their communities, their corporate cultures, communications practices, and the discourse surrounding membership and participation.
Our project will be focused into four clusters that look at contemporary aspects of Canadian society and the roles of co-operatives within these different fields.
The purpose of our project, through each of these four clusters, is to produce publications and practical ideas to meet the needs of academics, students, co-operatives, and governments.
This project will give academics and students a better understanding of Canadian communities and relevant knowledge about the role of organizations in Canada today. Student learning will be an important part of the research, aided by a substantial commitment of $100,000 in student funding from the College of Graduate Studies and Research at this university. This project will provide funding to at least 7 graduate students, most of them based at the U of S, who will benefit from scholarships, fellowships, summer research employment, and travel funds under the grant.
The project will enable co-operatives to be more responsive to members, more efficient in anticipating and meeting their needs, and in the process more effective at supporting change in Canadian communities in an era of globalization. Our project will give co-operatives information, models, and practical suggestions for how to relate to their members and market themselves and their services.
As a result of this research, governments will be better informed about the importance of co-operatives and of voluntary membership in shaping communities and services. This project will contribute to more effective government policy in regards to communities, business, consumer issues, trade, globalization, and services. One purpose of the project is to make specific recommendations to governments about public policy in such areas.
This is an exciting program of research that will create new knowledge of practical benefit to researchers, students, co-operatives, communities, and governments. We are delighted that our centre can act as the linchpin, and we look forward to three years of productive work.