Research Overview

The interdisciplinary research team included fifteen academic co-investigators from universities across the country and more than twenty community partners from Nunavut to Halifax to Victoria. The project explored the extent to which co-operatives reflect or contribute to social cohesion, or a common sense of identity, in the communities where they are located. The project was arranged into four broad and overlapping clusters of research—urban consumers, rural regionalization and other changing definitions of community, Aboriginal cultures, and information technologies. The purpose of our project, through each of these four clusters, was to produce publications and practical ideas to meet the needs of academics, students, co-operatives, and governments. The research process relied on active collaboration between co-investigators and partner organizations. The research findings 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.

Why study co-operatives and social cohesion?

First, co-operatives 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 practicing 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.

Focus Areas

Our project was focused into four inter-related clusters that looked at contemporary aspects of Canadian society and the roles of co-operatives within these different fields.

The four clusters focused on:

• Co-operative consumer identities in urban communities (cluster 1) looked at how consumer co-operative membership in large urban centres like Calgary, Vancouver, and Halifax related to the urban experience of social cohesion.
• Co-operative membership and changing boundaries of community (cluster 2) looked at changing geographic and social boundaries of community, and how these affect existing co-ops and are expressed in the creation of new co-ops. One focus was rural regionalization in the areas around Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in the Manitoba Interlake, and in Québec forestry communities. Regarding changing social boundaries of community, we examined the experience of "social-solidarity" co-operatives for marginalized populations in regions of Québec.
• Co-operation and Aboriginal cultures (cluster 3) examined the "fit" between co-operative models and different Aboriginal cultures in Canada, and the potential for further development. Key research here focused on highly successful co-operatives in the Canadian Arctic.
• Information technologies and the co-operative redefinition of community (cluster 4) examined how co-ops use new technology to reinforce or create cohesion, for example through the new dotCoop internet domain.

Cluster Diagram (pdf)

Researchers | Partner Organizations | Full Proposal | Bibliographies