The cultural environment of different countries makes a big difference to how easy – or hard – it is to set up and run businesses, and that is especially true for co-operative organisations! But culture is just one element of what makes an enabling environment for co-operatives; and the International Co-operative Alliance's report, "Doing Co-operative Business", looks at a wide range of enabling factors for co-ops.
The Doing Co-operative Business report, as part of a wider scope looks into how strongly a country's culture affects the success of its co-ops.
Using the 'Hofstede Cultural Indicators', the Alliance's report investigates these indicators as a framework for cross-cultural communication developed by Dutch social psychologist, Geert Hofstede.
Hofstede describes national cultures along six dimensions: Power-Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty-Avoidance, Masculinity, Long Term Orientation, and Indulgence-Restraint. Applying these dimensions to co-op businesses, the report has discovered:
- Co-ops are more likely to be embraced in countries where disadvantaged people don't accept unequal power distribution
- In countries where a lot of people feel threatened by uncertainty, co-ops are less likely to flourish – because the model needs a high level of engagement
- In societies where the ties between people are loose and everyone is expected to look after themselves and their families, co-op sectors are small – but in countries where there is a higher level of in-group solidarity, the co-op sector is bigger, too
- Co-ops are more likely to attract more persistent members in countries where there is higher gender equality, with men and women equally sharing participation in voluntary organisations
- As people-centred businesses, co-ops focus on future rewards rather than short-term profits – so they are also more successful in societies which have long-term orientations
- In a more 'indulgent' society that allows relatively free gratification, citizens seem to be more confident of their own competences – and are more likely to turn to co-operative entrepreneurship as a form of self-help, self-responsibility and self-control.
But culture is just one element of what makes an enabling environment for co-operatives; and the Alliance's work on the Hofstede indicators is just one part of a larger report called Doing Co-operative Business.
Written by Dutch academic Hans Groeneveld, other elements of the report explore how governance, corruption and democracy indicators, among others, can create the perfect enabling environment for co-ops – and how this can vary across various types of co-ops or countries.
