Aim and Methodological Issues

The World Co-operative Monitor is a project promoted by the Inter- national Co-operative Alliance with the scientific support of EURICSE. The project is continuing the work started by the Alliance with the Global 300, which brought together economic information about the 300 largest co-operative and mutual organizations in the world, broadening its goals and reviewing its methodology.

The intent of this new project is to define a new process of data collection, integration, and analysis, culminating in the creation of a regularly updated database containing economic, employee, and other social data to monitor and demonstrate both the economic and social impact of the largest co-operatives worldwide. The database is expected to be useful in strengthening the Alliance's role in building networks of global co-operative leaders. It also has the potential to lead and coordinate global, regional, and national initiatives on data collection and evidence-based policy and advocacy. Finally, the development of this database will further address the Alliance's strategic objective of promoting co-operatives as a special values-based business model by building a co-operative business intelligence service for analysis and benchmarking performance, not only in financial terms, but also in terms of co-operative values and principles.

The aim of this project is to collect robust economic, organizational, and social data - not only related to the top three hundred co-operative and mutual organizations worldwide, but also an expanded number of co-operatives - in order to represent the co-operative sector in its organizational, regional, and sectorial diversity. That said, providing a clear and agreed-on definition of the population under study is the first methodological issue that researchers face. For the purpose of the project, it is important that the boundaries of the population under study are understandable worldwide, and that they reflect the characteristics of co-operative organizations in different areas of the world and in different contexts. The process of definition and classification, however, is not trivial, as researchers working on this face two main issues: (a) the diversity of national legislation and (b) the variety of co-operative forms. Comparative studies show that legislation concerning co-operatives varies widely from country to country - much more than does legislation on for-profit enterprises (Roelants 2009). In particular, national laws often do not consider all forms of co-operatives, and they are restrictive about various aspects, such as the minimum number of members or the rules limiting the distribution of profits. In addition to the legislative diversity, it is necessary to consider the organizational diversity within the co-operative sector. In recent years, researchers have been studying the varied and multifaceted nature of co-operative organizations (Hansmann 1988; Fici 2013), highlighting how co-operative organizations vary in the relationship between the co-operative and its members and for the type of activity carried out. The co-operative sector is generally characterized by a high prevalence of alliances and vertical and horizontal collaborations (Zevi et al. 2011). For these reasons, hybrid forms such as co-operatives of co-operatives, co-operative groups, and co-operative networks, as well as investor-owned enterprises in which co-operatives have a controlling interest, have also been considered in the study.

To evaluate the role and importance of the co-operative movement within the global economy, and of co-operatives within their economic context, it is important to consider not only their direct, but also their indirect, impact. In other words, the value created in the final production process has to be added to those created in previous rounds of production. Furthermore, in many cases, co-operatives develop a system of relationships with other companies through which they gain advantages in the distribution of final goods, credit, and other services (Fontanari and Borzaga 2010).

The variety of existing organizations that refer to the co-operative model has been schematized for the purpose of the project in the typologies shown in table 1. Another stage of complexity derives from the role played by members within the organization and their composition. On this basis, co-operatives have been divided into the subtypes shown in table 2.