Last month Co-op News talked to Ilana Gotz from Icbec, the International Co-operative Business Education Consortium.
A short segment of these discussions will appear in the next edition of our podcast.
But first a little context and history.
Origins of business education
The development of business education and the co-operative movement has mostly happened in parallel, but very much separately, over the past decades.
Many of the early pioneers of studying and teaching about business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to call their subject simply “administration”. It covered all types of human organisations – but rarely, if ever, specifically mentioned co-operatives.
Later – especially in the USA – this was split into business administration and public administration, so that investor-owned or state-owned businesses were studied separately.
In the USA, and many other countries, this split was institutionalised in universities into business schools (and Masters of Business Administration (MBA) courses) and public administration schools (and Masters of Public Administration (MPA) programmes). It’s become more complicated since then, but that’s another story.
What we haven’t seen are many courses in co-operative administration for member-owned businesses – much less actual schools of co-operative administration.
Icbec
The International Co-operative Business Education Consortium (Icbec) therefore faces an uphill struggle. We talked to Ilana Gotz, one of the co-ordinators of the Icbec network.
Gotz is based at Euricse – a centre for co-operative and social economy teaching and research, which was founded in 2008 at the initiative of the University of Trento, Italy, with the support of the Trentino Federation of Cooperatives.
Two other institutes provided core support to the relaunch of Icbec in 2021 – coordinating support from the International Centre for Co-operative Management (ICCM, Saint Mary’s University, Canada) and financial support from Sistema OCB (Brazil). This made Icbec a multi-national, indeed multi-continental, initiative from the start.
Related: Lessons in education from the Cooperative University of Kenya
Gotz told us that Icbec had been re-established, after a period of dormancy, to bring together those educators and researchers in business schools and other bits of universities who are active in co-operative business education.
Icbec now has 25 institutional members in Belgium, Brazil, Canada (x4), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Finland, Ireland, Italy (x2), New Zealand, the Philippines, Spain (x3), Trinidad & Tobago, USA (x2), and the UK.
One important point we discussed with Gotz is that, because of the under-developed and fragmentary nature of scholarship and education on co-operative business, there are often only a handful of scholars in any single university interested in the subject. So Icbec is making it clear it is open to individuals to become supporters – not just institutes, schools or centres. Over 150 further individuals and groups are participating in the network.
Purpose
So what is Icbec for? Gotz told us the consortium exists primarily to bring together co-operative business educators firstly to create a shared sense of mission. Secondly to share their approaches and programs to better understand the similarities and differences between different countries and institutions approaches.
It is worth noting at this point that both business and public administration education varies hugely around the world. Although MBA/MPA is the largest approach it is not the only one.
For example, in Germany business and public managers main education is often in science, technology, economics, etc – often up to PhD level. In Japan the tradition has been more in-house ‘on-the-job’ training and development. While in the UK, up until the 1990s, most senior public and private managers had no advanced business or other education at all.
So one of the key aims and activities within the Icbec network is to try and share understanding of each others programmes, collaborate where feasible, and avoid overlap and competition if possible.
Related: Argentina’s co-operativas escolares – a case study in co-op education
Partly because of these national differences, which frequently conform to regional cultural traditions and institutional patterns, one of Icbec’s projects is to foster regional discussions and exchanges. These may also help with better regional co-ordination of co-operative business education resources in regions that form natural catchment areas for provision and take-up.
At the same time some of the global differences in approach and methods may help to cross-fertilise innovations in educational practices. So Icbec is running a series of seminars on teaching innovations. They are also planning to set up groups on specific areas of teaching interest, including participatory methods and case studies.
Case studies
Another Icbec project is to collaborate with Portail.coop, based at the University of Montreal in Canada. This is an initiative to create an on-line repository about co-operatives and the social economy.
Portail’s website says: “Knowledge about co-operatives and mutuals is poorly digitalised, poorly gathered and poorly organised, and therefore difficult to access internationally.
“Thus, the co-operative model is the subject of little academic research and is rarely taught compared to its economic weight, for lack of easily accessible data and documentation. This scarcity of knowledge limits understanding of the co-operative and the mutualist model, its challenges and opportunities, and therefore limits its development potential.”
Icbec’s particular interest is in enhancing the number and quality of teaching case studies, says Gotz. Case studies are widely used for teaching in business and public administration schools – the flagship example being Harvard Business School. But as usual, co-operatives, social enterprises and other social economy actors are mostly invisible in these collections.
Cross-sector co-operation?
One area for exploration is enhanced co-operation across economic-organisation divides. Despite their differences in ownership and purpose investor-owned, publicly owned and membership-owned businesses do share quite a lot of common features and functions.
Areas like product development and innovation, sales and marketing, financial management, human resources, and even strategy share some common features, regardless of ownership models. And although their purposes may differ considerably, people being educated in at least some core generic knowledge and methods can be useful and efficient.
Some business schools already do this to a limited extent for public and not-for-profit organisations and managers. In some UK universities MBA students may be more than 50% from public or not-for-profit organisations.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Gotz agreed with us that there has been something of a surge in publications about co-operatives and the social economy – professional magazines, academic journals, lots of books and more recently also social media.
Does this augur well for the future development of the co-operative business education?
