Cooperative management: a successful model to meet the challenges of the future

This book is the fruit of our work on and with cooperatives over the last 20 years. Throughout this period, we have carried out a great deal of research into the management of cooperatives, much of it using action research methodology, i.e., directly involving teams of managers, employees and directors. We have also written a large number of case studies on cooperative management, while sitting on various (cooperative) boards of directors.

From a theoretical point of view, our work has enabled us to develop three key ideas on which our entire conception of cooperative management is based. The first is a model of cooperative equilibrium, which aligns cooperative values and principles within a suitable management framework. A second key model, developed at the end of the 1990s, enabled us to identify what we called the cooperative identity malaise. The third key model in our approach to cooperative management identifies the strategic levers of what we have termed a New Cooperative Paradigm (NPC), a process of reflection that began over 20 years ago and has now led us to recognize the potential for significant competitive advantage inherent in the cooperative mode of organization. The basic idea behind this NPC is to seek out the advantages inherent in the cooperative organization mode when faced with current and future challenges, compared with other organization modes. Today, our vision of these challenges is fueled by the recognition of emerging strategies, namely the congruence of organization-employee values seen from the angle of Schwartz's taxonomy of values, from loyalty orientation to commitment orientation, psychological ownership, democratization and the value co-creation process.This book also presents several cooperative management cases that were written over the last 20 years. They illustrate the different facets and components of the three ideas (models) at the heart of this book.