SEPTEMBER 2018

CO-OP VALUES
IN THE
MODERN WORLD
It may seem like the soft side of business, but
values are at the heart of every example of cooperative
excellence – and core to the advisory
work of Co-operatives UK.
The International Co-operative Alliance has
codified 10 values – six co-operative and four
ethical. The co-operative values – self-help,
self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity,
solidarity – describe the design of the business.
The ethical values – honesty, openness, social
responsibility, caring for others – describe its
operation.
Alongside these are seven principles – three on
how co-op ownership should be structured, three
on co-op culture and one on the independence of
the business as a democratic enterprise. As Sion
Whellens of Calverts Worker Co-op says, while
the structure and independence of ownership
makes you a co-op, it is your commitment to
co-operative culture that makes you part of the
wider co-op movement.
The evolution of the values is in itself a
fascinating example of deliberation within a
social movement. The list emerged from an
extensive global dialogue, with around 10,000
meetings around the world. One of the key
figures involved in that process, Professor Ian
MacPherson, said the list “does not induce
tidy uniformity… the application of ‘honesty’
can vary across different cultures and kinds of
co-operatives. Openness depends as much on
social relations within a given society and the
management culture of a given co-operative
as it does on generally accepted accounting
standards. The point is that values, while they
can have some similar characteristics around the
world, also vary greatly in kinds of understanding
and ways of being expressed.”
Academic research on values tends to support
this. The European and World Values Survey
draws on a framework applicable to every culture
around the world, even if every culture will have
its own very different emphasis and inflections.
The co-operative components of these surveys
are what Co-operatives UK has used in widely
cited work to track public attitudes in relation to
co-operative values.
Of course, co-ops come in all shapes
and sizes, and this is also true for what they
do in terms of values. The research centre
EURICSE interviewed opinion leaders in
the sector in 2013. They said that, while
co-ops worldwide tend to be strict on their
structure, they are looser in terms of culture.
Many fail to fulfil at least one of the seven cooperative
principles – the least complied with
being the commitment to education, training
and information.
So, to explore this, Co-operatives UK set out
to research two dozen co-operatives worldwide.
Each one does communicate values of some
kind. The global value most commonly promoted
is ‘social responsibility’, followed by reference to
democracy and then openness. The least cited
were self-help, solidarity and caring for others.
The impact of the co-operative sector having
a global set of values is hard to test, but there is
some evidence to suggest that businesses with
distinctive values may act in distinctive ways.
The global values offer a prompt, or default,
for co-ops that can be a reference point for its
members. In France, co-ops are now required
to conduct an independent audit for members
at least once every five years to assess their
co-operative difference.
In many countries, ethical values are core to
the brand values of co-ops. Ethical Consumer
magazine, which draws on an extensive
database of ethical screening, states that cooperative
businesses are in the top third of
ethical performers in 80% of the markets that
they surveyed, and are the top performers in
23% of markets.
Co-operatives UK has championed the role
of values and culture across the UK economy.
A recent and notable success has been the
introduction of values and purpose by the
Financial Reporting Council into the new
governance code for all listed businesses. Of
course, it is easy to proclaim values but do little
to live up to them or to set an ethical purpose
and use it only for marketing, and arguably many
corporates do this, but the move will put more
scrutiny on those companies and it helps to point
to co-ops as best practice.
A World Values Day has been established,
with our input, and takes place this year on 18
October 2018: worldvaluesday.com.
BY ED MAYO
SECRETARY GENERAL,
CO-OPERATIVES UK
SEPTEMBER 2018 | 39