The chapter offers a ‘landscape review’ to reflect on the state-of-the-art assessment of the gap between competencies and knowledge needed to boost the role of the cooperative sector in a modern economy and the supply of research and training through higher education. It argues for the need to correct the focus of the education provision by universities and business schools to ensure a tighter fit with changing business conditions favouring plurality and new societal demands supporting participatory democracy. The chapter identifies related capabilities and skill shortages that need to be addressed and maintains that co-operatives should be more receptive to mainstream business and management education. The analysis lays foundations for international cross-sectoral initiatives that can be delivered by academia in collaboration with the cooperative sector.
The book brings together examples of co-operation and co-operatives from around Europe that investigate different instances of grass roots co-operative ventures on the ground. These examples are brought into the context of the 21st century as a contribution to socio-economic reflections on how Western society, principally in Europe but with possible transferability elsewhere, might best be able to confront the multiple crises of our times. The three parts of the book move, first, from co-operative case studies as individual ‘seeds’ for a possible future, second, through the transition necessary for culture change via co-operative education, to, third, the development of social systems that challenge the neoliberal status quo of society today. The book works on the premise that the social and economic systems that have been taken for granted for decades in the 20th century are being challenged in the 21st and that a move from competition to co-operation is needed to ensure future survival and prosperity.This volume explores where, how and why the cooperative model is having a distinctive, transformational impact in driving socio-economic changes in a post-pandemic 21st century world.Drawing from a diverse range of examples, the book sheds light on how today’s cooperatives and a co-operative way of organising might serve new societal demands. It examines organisational structures and governance models that develop socio-economic resilience in cooperatives. The book’s contributors reveal how the very pursuit of cooperative values and principles challenges market fundamentalism and promotes participatory democracy.This is a timely contribution to recent debates around transformative economies and an invaluable resource for scholars and activists interested in alternative ways of organising.This volume offers an important vision of co-operation as an alternative to the neoliberal market, exploring the cooperative model’s potential for driving environmental and socio-economic transformation in the post-COVID world.