Prof Talbot was previously a professor in the politics department at the university and was chair of government in the School of Social Sciences. He is also a research associate at the University of Cambridge, and on the board of the UK Society for Co-operative Studies.
Co-operatives are invisible. No, of course I don’t mean literally invisible. But in the UK the co-operative and mutual sector may as well be invisible for all the discussion it gets in public affairs generally. In politics, policy, economics, business, management and organisation discussions it rarely makes an appearance.
Last July, the UK had a general election in which the Labour Party swept to power with over 400 MPs. Except they aren’t all “Labour” MPs – 43 of them are Labour and Co-operative Party MPs (the highest number ever).
These are MPs representing both the Labour Party and its sister the Co-operative Party – which is a registered independent political party. Which most people – including nearly all political commentators – seem to not know exists or if they do ignore it.
Moreover the Labour manifesto committed the incoming government to doubling the size of the UK’s co-operative and mutual sector.
According to Co-operatives UK, the sector’s umbrella body, the turnover of the 9,342 co-operatives and mutuals in the UK is around £166bn. They employ around 1.3 million people and have 15 million co-operative members (69 million if you include mutuals – many people are members of more than one). Double all those numbers and you get some idea of how big a commitment the Labour government has made.
Some ways to do this were fleshed out in the chancellor’s budget. But did you notice the coverage of this fairly substantial policy in the media? No, me neither. Nor the original commitment in the Labour manifesto.
A couple of other examples. Who knew that under the last Labour government, between 2007 and 2010 Labour promoted the idea of schools becoming co-operatives and that at its height there were around 600 of them? Nor was it just Labour pushing co-ops: the Coalition and Tory governments of 2010-2024 pushed the idea of turning some public services into contracted-out co-operatives. (Although this is questionable: liberal factions did push the mutuals and employee ownership agenda, but this “privatisation by the back door” was seen as controversial in some quarters.)
So why do all these activities and issues consistently fly completely under the public radar?
Let’s start with a confession. Universities and academics are partly to blame – including me.
Up until the 1990s UK universities were pretty bad at paying attention to business generally. Few had business schools and the study of organisations, management and businesses was largely relegated to “the ologies” – sociology, anthropology, social psychology and economics.
The 1990s saw a huge expansion of business schools following a couple of seminal reports pointing out how bad the UK was at training managers compared to most of our cohort of advanced capitalist democracies.
The USA and large parts of Europe had business schools and MBAs. Many German managers had PhDs, whilst many British ones didn’t even have first degrees. Japan had well-developed in-house management development programmes. Some Japanese firms even ran their own in-house colleges. In Britain we had a small handful of business schools like London and Manchester, and not much else.
During the 1990s there was rapid expansion of multi-disciplinary business schools. I remember it well because I was part of it. After completing a part-time master’s in 1990 I joined Southbank University’s Management Centre (later Business School) from local government as senior lecturer.
In my master’s degree – which concentrated on the organisation and management of public (state-owned) services but also looked across public and privately owned entities – we never looked at co-operatives.
This was in the late 1980s – the height of the privatisation campaign conducted by the Thatcher government. Public and academic discussions focused on the binary choice of privately owned businesses or publicly owned utilities and services. Co-ops didn’t get a look in.
I recently had a look back through some of the major textbooks on organisations and management that I used in my master’s and PhD in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Co-operatives rarely get mentioned. For example, Gareth Morgan’s classic Images of Organizations, which was ubiquitous on MBA reading lists, has a single page on co-operatives.
And so to the second major reason co-operatives get ignored – ideology. Most of the 20th century – and especially its later decades – saw a global contest between communism or democratic socialism on one side and capitalist liberal democracy on the other.
The fall of communism in the USSR and eastern Europe in the 1990s was the biggest manifestation of this contest. But the Thatcher and Regan’s new right attempts to “roll back the frontiers of the state” (Thatcher’s words) in the 1980s also tried to rebalance western democracies more towards “free markets”.
In this grand ideological battle between capitalism and socialism, capitalism was mostly happy to mostly ignore co-operatives; socialist states had co-ops, but they were state-owned. True co-ops didn’t really fit easily into the struggle between state ownership and private ownership.
Which brings us to a further element which makes co-ops invisible – national statistics. It is easy to forget just how new national statistics are. Up until World War II statistics about nations were very rudimentary and idiosyncratic to individual countries. This was especially true for economic activity.
Although the idea of measuring Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was introduced in the 1930s it was not adopted as an international standard until 1944. And since then an internationally agreed System of National Accounts has evolved, agreed by the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, OECD and European Commission.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has published guidelines on statistics for co-ops, but most accounting conventions tend to mirror the ideological divide discussed above. Entities are classed as either public or private sector. Almost all organisations that are truly independent of government control are classed as private sector.
This includes not just co-ops and mutuals, but other major institutions such universities in the UK. They are lumped together with private and public equity, investor-owned businesses. This is what the prominent scholar of organisations, Henry Mintzberg, calls the ‘plural sector’. And as he has noted in his 2015 book Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center:
“Despite the prominence of all this activity, the plural sector remains surprisingly obscure, having been ignored for so long in the great debates over left versus right. This sector cannot be found between the other two, as if on some straight line. It is a different place, as different from the private and public sectors as these two are from each other.”
Mintzberg goes on to say: “So picture instead a balanced society as sitting on a stool with three sturdy legs: a public sector of respected governments, to provide many of our protections (such as policing and regulating); a private sector of responsible businesses, to supply many of our goods and services; and a plural sector of robust communities, wherein we find many of our social affiliations.”
On the tenth anniversary of the above book, I will be talking to Henry Mintzberg about developments since his important contribution and reporting those discussions here. And I’ll be exploring other issues in and around the world of co-operatives, mutuals and the broader plural sector associations.
