Final Report Summary - CO-OP ISOMPRPHISM (CO-OP ISOMORPHISM: From epidemiology of implicit anthropologies to good co-operative governance)
Although they were collectively self-governed, the Biblical Israelites asked the prophet Samuel to give them a king "such as all the other nations have" (Samuel 8:1-5). In this way, they demonstrated one of the most ancient recorded acts of undergoing “a constraining process that forces one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions" (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 149). This phenomenon is called "organizational isomorphism" and is present throughout human history. We are interested in this process because of its destructive power; that is, it has successfully diluted or annihilated many social innovations and reform movements in civil, religious and economic institutions over the centuries and continues to do so up to the present day. We can observe, and, generally, it is only a matter of time, when the activity of any new movement, social initiative or organization with highly innovative, even radical, reform ideas, gradually deteriorates into mere “business as usual” and loses its original change-making character. We are, in general terms, though with significant variation, witnessing this phenomenon in the co-operative movement. The movement that 150 years ago redefined enterprise in several crucial ways has, very frequently, gradually slid down the slippery slope into business as usual, and many of its leading proponents hardly notice it.
In this research, we address two questions. (1) Why do some co-operatives isomorph into what appear to be conventional, investor-owned companies in their operations and lose their co-operative identity? (2) How can co-op members and leaders, who seem to be slipping down this isomorphism slope, come to recognize the strategic value in adherence to Co-operative Values and Principles, audit themselves and their co-operative and avoid this destructive process?
Classical studies by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) propose three forces of institutional isomorphism: (i) coercive; (ii) mimetic and (iii) normative, sweeping "alternative" organizations and trends toward the mainstream. In summary, the tremendous growth in conventional busineses and their productivity and profitabilty over the 19th and 20th centuries, and their resulting market and financial power, meant that conventional business' expectations and values, its "epidemiology of representations" became inextricably intertwined with culture in the industrialized West (and later elsewhere). These cultural and socioeconomic forces create isomorphic trends in co-operative firms, "pushing and pulling" their leaders and members toward acting and appearing as conventional firms with a profit-maximization orientation and a corresponding dilution of humanistic, co-operative norms, values and practices.
In this research, we claim that, related to, but also distinct from, the market and economic factors, isomorphism has psychological roots in what we term, "the contagion of implicit anthropologies" (semi- or pre-conscious habits of mind and action) as well as in co-op members' / owners' level of business / economic literacy and in organizational governance structures. We proposed to audit these aspects of co-operatives through a set of online tools, several of which were created and/or refined during the fellowship. The development of the toolkit was based on the Vroom participatory leadership model, where expertise plays an important part in the decision-making process. We hope that the proposed audit improves awareness of isomorphism and helps to reverse it using appropriate policies and development methods.
Co-op isomorphism and loss of co-operative identity affets organizations, but it starts at the individual level when people make their decisions about what to believe and how to act. We think that, to understand the process fully, we should take a broad, transdisciplinary perspective and, thus, in the course of developing the appropriate tools, we came to the conclusion that "lifestyle" is the best, most comprehensive and most reliable measure of "implicit anthropology". This seemingly “methodological” decision led us discover the unprecedented impact of markets and their players on our most apparently private and intimate aspects of life and our ways of thinking about them – our lifestyles.
The most dedicated discipline in the studies of lifestyle is lifestyle medicine. It is there, where the most powerful effects of profit orientation are best counted and accounted for in individuals' decisions. For this very reason, we used lifestyle medicine's causal model (Maibach, et al., 2007) as the inspiration for constructing our tools for co-operative auditing. Finding the link between co-operative values and health here has its predecessors in other research. Erdal (2014) and Gago, Arando, Freundlich et al. (2013) have explored it in recent years, showing, at least in preliminary ways, how "co-operative enteprise" appears to influence health and well-being at the individual and community level.
In this research, we explored individuals’ semi- or pre-conscious rejection of lifestyles based on free, informed choices and oriented to human flourishing and their their semi- or pre-conscious internalization of market values and behavior. We sought analyze the effects of these choices on their daily decision-making in general and, specifically, in co-operative enterprise and the ways in which this leads to the deterioration of cooperative's original identity and the gradual assumption of the values and practices of conventional businesses -- isomorphism. Figure 1 depicts all the variables of the study.
Figure 1. Co-operative isomorphism as a result of lifestyle changes caused by 8 factors (see Attachment 1 "Project Blueprint of the Project - English 001")
During the first outgoing phase of the project, we collected or developed all the tools for all the variables of the study. We also prepared online versions of these tools and executed a pilot study with 33 participants. Two, small co-operatives participated in the pilot research, but the option participants had drop out of the study led much missing data and made substantive data analysis futile. For this reason, in the Return phase of the project, we reframed the project to collect mainly individual data. We also put the content of the report into a blog, created Polish and Spanish versions of both the blog as well as all the tools and have written feedback texts to all the tools to encourage participation. To test the central hypothesis of the study about the influence of the lifestyle on the process of the isomorphism, we selected four independent variables: two measures of lifestyle, the measure of recognition of dignity in the work place and co-operative decision making (the Tacit Knowledge Inventory) with isomorphism as the dependent variable. Although the tool was developed initially to measure co-operative expertise, as it was based on the decision-making situations, it is an excellent measure of isomorphism as well. The selection of variables is shown in green in Figure 2.
Figure 2. The selection of the variables for demonstrating co-operative isomorphism as a result of lifestyle (see Attachment 2 "Project Blueprint of the Project - English 002")
The pilot study calculations found very high R-squared = .94 (that is, the portion of variance in the dependent variable, explained by the independent variables) for the first Canadian pilot study, but a low R-squared = .11 for the European replication. This result is auspicious and encourages further study based on tools specifically created for a given country, more closely adapted to its culture and cooperative sector. It shows that using translated versions of the Canadian tools did not yield comparable evidence for the existence of isomorphism in Canada and in the Basque Country of Spain. The project also requires more sophisticated software to control the participation of individuals, although more than 300 persons volunteered to participate in the surveys, they could not be easily reached and reminded and encouraged to participate anew (that is, to read feedback literature and move on to the next questionnaire) because of Google spam filters. Further, a place where each participant could see which tools s/he had completed or not completed in the project was also unavailable in the selected software. All these issues can be addressed without great difficulty in future research. The results are very encouraging with respect to the promise of international project, especially when we take into account the broad social importance of the results.
The cooperative sector has proven enormously important to the European economy. Co-operatives and other social economy organizations number over 10 million in Europe and provide 6.5% of European employment (SEE, 2017). Further, and quite contrary to conventional wisdom, co-operative companies perform just as well or better than conventional companies on key indicators of firm performance (Fakhfakh, Perotin and Gago, 2012; Perotin, 2016). In sum, this sector generates economically viable enterprises that tend to ... promote social cohesion and diminish inequality ... facilitate significant participation by workers, consumers and citizens in economic decision making ... create substantial quality employment and maintain it during economic crises... fill key gaps in product and social services not provided either by conventional companies or the public sector ... encourage mutual self-help and entrepreneurship... and that, generally, promote a more fair, healthy, cohesive and sustainable economy. Still, the dominant enterprise paradigm is obviously the conventional, investor-owned firm seeking principally to maximize profits. This model and the enormous social and cultural forces that have taken shape and grown with it over the last two centuries, forcefully push and pull cooperatives toward isomorphism -- pressuring them, often in semi- and pre-conscious ways to appear and behave as conventional companies. Helping cooperatives and their members avoid this fate, now too widespread (that is, reinforcing the research carried out in this project, and the training and development gained by the recruited researcher) is, hence, of marked interest to policy-makers, government agencies and legislators at all levels, from municipalities to EU bodies, as well as to many thousands of existing co-operative enterprises in Europe and their European and member-state federations and confederations.
Project Web site: http://myindex.stocki.org/ and www.stocki.org
Contact: http://myindex.stocki.org/contacto/ ... or: ryszard@stocki.org
REFERENCES
DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Collective rationality and institutional isomorphism in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147-160.
Erdal, D. (2014). Employee ownership and health: An initial study. In: S. Novkovic & T. Webb (Eds.), Co-operatives in a post-growth era: Creating co-operative economics. London: Zed Books, 210-220.
Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, M. (2012). Productivity, capital and labor in labor-managed and conventional firms. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 65(4): 847-879.
Gago, M., Arando, S., Freundlich, F., Larrañaga, N., Larrañaga, M., Esnaola, S., Machón, M., & Chamosa, S. (2013, April) Cooperative employment and mortality rates. Paper presented at the conference: Strengthening Democracy – Employee Ownership and its Wider Effects – Building Healthy Communities (Scottish Universities Insight Institute, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland).
Maibach, E. W., Abrams, L. C., and Marosits, M. (2007). Communication and marketing as tools to cultivate the public health: A proposed “people and places” framework. BMC Public Health, 7:88. Available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/88
Pérotin, V. (2016). What do we really know about workers' co-operatives? In Webster, A., Shaw, L., & Vorberg-Rugh, R. (Ed.), Mainstreaming co-operation: An alternative for the twenty-first century?. : 239Manchester University Press.
SEE - Social Economy Europe (2017). http://www.socialeconomy.eu.org/social-economy . Accessed 5 September, 2017.
In this research, we address two questions. (1) Why do some co-operatives isomorph into what appear to be conventional, investor-owned companies in their operations and lose their co-operative identity? (2) How can co-op members and leaders, who seem to be slipping down this isomorphism slope, come to recognize the strategic value in adherence to Co-operative Values and Principles, audit themselves and their co-operative and avoid this destructive process?
Classical studies by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) propose three forces of institutional isomorphism: (i) coercive; (ii) mimetic and (iii) normative, sweeping "alternative" organizations and trends toward the mainstream. In summary, the tremendous growth in conventional busineses and their productivity and profitabilty over the 19th and 20th centuries, and their resulting market and financial power, meant that conventional business' expectations and values, its "epidemiology of representations" became inextricably intertwined with culture in the industrialized West (and later elsewhere). These cultural and socioeconomic forces create isomorphic trends in co-operative firms, "pushing and pulling" their leaders and members toward acting and appearing as conventional firms with a profit-maximization orientation and a corresponding dilution of humanistic, co-operative norms, values and practices.
In this research, we claim that, related to, but also distinct from, the market and economic factors, isomorphism has psychological roots in what we term, "the contagion of implicit anthropologies" (semi- or pre-conscious habits of mind and action) as well as in co-op members' / owners' level of business / economic literacy and in organizational governance structures. We proposed to audit these aspects of co-operatives through a set of online tools, several of which were created and/or refined during the fellowship. The development of the toolkit was based on the Vroom participatory leadership model, where expertise plays an important part in the decision-making process. We hope that the proposed audit improves awareness of isomorphism and helps to reverse it using appropriate policies and development methods.
Co-op isomorphism and loss of co-operative identity affets organizations, but it starts at the individual level when people make their decisions about what to believe and how to act. We think that, to understand the process fully, we should take a broad, transdisciplinary perspective and, thus, in the course of developing the appropriate tools, we came to the conclusion that "lifestyle" is the best, most comprehensive and most reliable measure of "implicit anthropology". This seemingly “methodological” decision led us discover the unprecedented impact of markets and their players on our most apparently private and intimate aspects of life and our ways of thinking about them – our lifestyles.
The most dedicated discipline in the studies of lifestyle is lifestyle medicine. It is there, where the most powerful effects of profit orientation are best counted and accounted for in individuals' decisions. For this very reason, we used lifestyle medicine's causal model (Maibach, et al., 2007) as the inspiration for constructing our tools for co-operative auditing. Finding the link between co-operative values and health here has its predecessors in other research. Erdal (2014) and Gago, Arando, Freundlich et al. (2013) have explored it in recent years, showing, at least in preliminary ways, how "co-operative enteprise" appears to influence health and well-being at the individual and community level.
In this research, we explored individuals’ semi- or pre-conscious rejection of lifestyles based on free, informed choices and oriented to human flourishing and their their semi- or pre-conscious internalization of market values and behavior. We sought analyze the effects of these choices on their daily decision-making in general and, specifically, in co-operative enterprise and the ways in which this leads to the deterioration of cooperative's original identity and the gradual assumption of the values and practices of conventional businesses -- isomorphism. Figure 1 depicts all the variables of the study.
Figure 1. Co-operative isomorphism as a result of lifestyle changes caused by 8 factors (see Attachment 1 "Project Blueprint of the Project - English 001")
During the first outgoing phase of the project, we collected or developed all the tools for all the variables of the study. We also prepared online versions of these tools and executed a pilot study with 33 participants. Two, small co-operatives participated in the pilot research, but the option participants had drop out of the study led much missing data and made substantive data analysis futile. For this reason, in the Return phase of the project, we reframed the project to collect mainly individual data. We also put the content of the report into a blog, created Polish and Spanish versions of both the blog as well as all the tools and have written feedback texts to all the tools to encourage participation. To test the central hypothesis of the study about the influence of the lifestyle on the process of the isomorphism, we selected four independent variables: two measures of lifestyle, the measure of recognition of dignity in the work place and co-operative decision making (the Tacit Knowledge Inventory) with isomorphism as the dependent variable. Although the tool was developed initially to measure co-operative expertise, as it was based on the decision-making situations, it is an excellent measure of isomorphism as well. The selection of variables is shown in green in Figure 2.
Figure 2. The selection of the variables for demonstrating co-operative isomorphism as a result of lifestyle (see Attachment 2 "Project Blueprint of the Project - English 002")
The pilot study calculations found very high R-squared = .94 (that is, the portion of variance in the dependent variable, explained by the independent variables) for the first Canadian pilot study, but a low R-squared = .11 for the European replication. This result is auspicious and encourages further study based on tools specifically created for a given country, more closely adapted to its culture and cooperative sector. It shows that using translated versions of the Canadian tools did not yield comparable evidence for the existence of isomorphism in Canada and in the Basque Country of Spain. The project also requires more sophisticated software to control the participation of individuals, although more than 300 persons volunteered to participate in the surveys, they could not be easily reached and reminded and encouraged to participate anew (that is, to read feedback literature and move on to the next questionnaire) because of Google spam filters. Further, a place where each participant could see which tools s/he had completed or not completed in the project was also unavailable in the selected software. All these issues can be addressed without great difficulty in future research. The results are very encouraging with respect to the promise of international project, especially when we take into account the broad social importance of the results.
The cooperative sector has proven enormously important to the European economy. Co-operatives and other social economy organizations number over 10 million in Europe and provide 6.5% of European employment (SEE, 2017). Further, and quite contrary to conventional wisdom, co-operative companies perform just as well or better than conventional companies on key indicators of firm performance (Fakhfakh, Perotin and Gago, 2012; Perotin, 2016). In sum, this sector generates economically viable enterprises that tend to ... promote social cohesion and diminish inequality ... facilitate significant participation by workers, consumers and citizens in economic decision making ... create substantial quality employment and maintain it during economic crises... fill key gaps in product and social services not provided either by conventional companies or the public sector ... encourage mutual self-help and entrepreneurship... and that, generally, promote a more fair, healthy, cohesive and sustainable economy. Still, the dominant enterprise paradigm is obviously the conventional, investor-owned firm seeking principally to maximize profits. This model and the enormous social and cultural forces that have taken shape and grown with it over the last two centuries, forcefully push and pull cooperatives toward isomorphism -- pressuring them, often in semi- and pre-conscious ways to appear and behave as conventional companies. Helping cooperatives and their members avoid this fate, now too widespread (that is, reinforcing the research carried out in this project, and the training and development gained by the recruited researcher) is, hence, of marked interest to policy-makers, government agencies and legislators at all levels, from municipalities to EU bodies, as well as to many thousands of existing co-operative enterprises in Europe and their European and member-state federations and confederations.
Project Web site: http://myindex.stocki.org/ and www.stocki.org
Contact: http://myindex.stocki.org/contacto/ ... or: ryszard@stocki.org
REFERENCES
DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Collective rationality and institutional isomorphism in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147-160.
Erdal, D. (2014). Employee ownership and health: An initial study. In: S. Novkovic & T. Webb (Eds.), Co-operatives in a post-growth era: Creating co-operative economics. London: Zed Books, 210-220.
Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, M. (2012). Productivity, capital and labor in labor-managed and conventional firms. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 65(4): 847-879.
Gago, M., Arando, S., Freundlich, F., Larrañaga, N., Larrañaga, M., Esnaola, S., Machón, M., & Chamosa, S. (2013, April) Cooperative employment and mortality rates. Paper presented at the conference: Strengthening Democracy – Employee Ownership and its Wider Effects – Building Healthy Communities (Scottish Universities Insight Institute, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland).
Maibach, E. W., Abrams, L. C., and Marosits, M. (2007). Communication and marketing as tools to cultivate the public health: A proposed “people and places” framework. BMC Public Health, 7:88. Available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/88
Pérotin, V. (2016). What do we really know about workers' co-operatives? In Webster, A., Shaw, L., & Vorberg-Rugh, R. (Ed.), Mainstreaming co-operation: An alternative for the twenty-first century?. : 239Manchester University Press.
SEE - Social Economy Europe (2017). http://www.socialeconomy.eu.org/social-economy . Accessed 5 September, 2017.