The co-operative has existed as an organizational form within capitalism since its invention in England and the USA in the 1820-30s (Whyman, 2012). While co-ops are successful insofar as they persist and develop in spite of crises (Birchall, 2013), they are unusual and diminuitive as a share of participant organizations in the economy overall. They must “fit” to survive within an owner/shareholder system of suppliers, government regulation and customers (among other stakeholders) which strains their principles. And they must struggle to establish and maintain norms and the symbols and other organizational elements that support them.
We posit this work as purposeful and skillful (Phillips & Lawrence, 2012): the tensions of capitalism and co-operative form must be negotiated to if the co-op is to remain a co-op in more than name and legal status. We believe this conflict for co-ops relates to boundary work (Drori, Wrzesniewski, & Ellis, 2013) insofar as it represents an integral tension that is addressed (i.e., acted on, ignored) knowingly (strategically) and unknowingly (constructedly). To maintain their “co-opness” beyond legal status, co-operatives must cleave across more (or less) opposing principles. Co-ops choose to be co-ops after all; they elect the non-default position at the time of their founding and have access to a shared symbolic repertoire, developed through their shared network organization, the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), as well as through other national or sector-based co-operative networks (e.g, logo, vocabulary, social networking,…). We posit that the social-symbolic work of co-operatives with their stakeholders reflects and feeds their “legitimate distinctiveness” (Navis & Glynn, 2011) in terms of balance between co-opness as an alternative, distinctive identity within the market, and alignment on mainstream capitalist principles.
Our research is guided by the following research questions: (1) how do co-ops manage this tension using public-facing social-symbolic work; and (2) what explanations can we develop that account for similarities and differences across co-ops in terms of social-symbolic work? For this conference, relying on previous work (Nelson et al., 2016), we will lay out and realize an empirical beta of the full project to be completed late 2017.
Our primary data source is derived from the 300 largest global co-operatives in terms of annual income, as described in the Global Co-operative Monitor, jointly provided by the ICA and Euricse (2016). To compose our sample, we selected ten banking/finance firms, five each from the US and Europe, and ten retail/wholesale firms, again split between the US and Europe (see Table 1). To describe and explain the types of social-symbolic work undertaken by these firms, we mainly turn to company websites. This line of research often deploys a combination of manual analysis and machine learning techniques in a means similar to grounded theory (Evans & Aceves, 2016). These computational tools can be used to gather text and images from websites and to analyze that data for representational patterns. Among other goals, this can reveal to social researchers the prevalence of certain issue frames, the appearance of structures through which collective meaning is communicated.
In this paper, we expect to develop a preliminary analysis on which to build subsequent work on the social-symbolic work of co-operatives. Our main empirical findings will relate to how co-operatives communicate their “co-opness” and how the range of symbolic work across co-ops can be categorized and studied. The novel empirical techniques with websites will highlight different ways of displaying “co-opness” in terms of texts and images, their positioning and visibility, and their evolution over time.
References
Birchall, J. (2013). The Potential of Co-Operatives During the Current Recession: Theorizing Comparative Advantage. Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 2(1), 1-22.
Drori, I., Wrzesniewski, A., & Ellis, S. (2013). One out of many? Boundary negotiation and identity formation in postmerger integration. Organization Science, 24(6), 1717–1741.
Evans, J. A., & Aceves, P. (2016). Machine translation: mining text for social theory. Annual Review of Sociology, 42(1), 21-50.
International Co-operative Alliance and Euricse. (2016). The World Co-Operative Monitor 2016. Trento: International Co-operative Alliance and Euricse.
Navis, C., & Glynn, M. A. (2011). Legitimate Distinctiveness and the Entrepreneurial Identity: Influence on Investor Judgments of New Venture Plausibility. Organization Studies, 36(3), 479-499.
Nelson, T., Nelson, D., Huybrechts, B., Dufays, F., O'Shea, N., & Trasciani, G. (2016). Emergent identity formation and the co-operative: theory building in relation to alternative organizational forms. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(3-4), 286-309.
Phillips, N., & Lawrence, T. B. (2012). The turn to work in organization and management theory: Some implications for strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 10(3), 223-230.
Whyman, P. B. (2012). Co-operative principles and the evolution of the ‘dismal science’: The historical interaction between co-operative and mainstream economics. Business History, 54(6), 833-854.
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
