This volume explores where, how and why the cooperative model is having a distinctive, transformational impact in driving socio-economic changes in a post-pandemic 21st century world. Drawing from a diverse range of examples, the book sheds light on how today’s cooperatives and a co-operative way of organising might serve new societal demands. It examines organisational structures and governance models that develop socio-economic resilience in cooperatives. The book’s contributors reveal how the very pursuit of cooperative values and principles challenges market fundamentalism and promotes participatory democracy. This is a timely contribution to recent debates around transformative economies and an invaluable resource for scholars and activists interested in alternative ways of organising.

In this book, we present a hypothesis that humans may be on the threshold of a new historical stage, one characterized by cooperation, democracy, the equitable distribution of resources, and a sustainable relationship with nature. We can act strategically on a range of activities to become a more cooperative society.

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

While co-operative ideas had been discussed in all the Nordic countries from at least the 1860s, it was not until the 1880s that the first permanent organizations appeared. Published to mark the UN International Year of the Co-operative in 2012, this groundbreaking volume examines the development of the co-operative movement in the Nordic countries and in eastern Europe. Co-operatives and the Social Question presents a unique comparative transnational perspective on the spread and development of co-operative ideas in these regions, as well as the links between them. The book offers a new perspective on late 19th- and early 20th-century debates on the social question, modernization, and the foundations of the welfare state. It is a wide-ranging history, ranging from the urban consumer co-operative societies of Sweden to the peasant organizations of Hungary and Galicia. The book not only provides an overview of the growth of co-operatives in those nations, but also traces the regional transnational spread of co-operative ideas and practices, as well as the importance of the moral and modernizing aims of co-operation. (Series: Scandinavia and the Baltic - Transnational and International Challenges) ***"After reading the book, one becomes more aware of the conflicts of interest, politics and ideology (or ideals) which have influenced both the emergence of early European co-operatives and their frequent affiliations to (or co-optation by) groups with differing political, nationalist, religious, economic and social aspirations....an important and delightful book..." - Nadia Johanisova, Journal of Co-operative Studies, Winter 2012

Co-operatives provide a different approach to organizing business through their ideals of member ownership and democratic practice. Every co-operative member has an equal vote regardless of his or her own personal capital investment. The contemporary significance of co-operatives was highlighted by the United Nations declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives. This book provides an international perspective on the development of co-operatives since the mid-nineteenth century, exploring the economic, political, and social factors that explain their varying fortunes and transformation into different forms. By looking at what co-operatives are; how they have changed; the developments as well as the persecutions of the co-operative movement; and how it is an important force in promoting development and self-sufficiency in non-industrialized areas, this book provides valuable insight not only to academics, but also to practitioners and policy makers.