How can the second co-operative principle of democratic member control best be translated into action?
Simon Pek, an associate professor of business and society at the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, thinks he has the answer to this question. In a recent conversation with the ICA director of legislation, Santosh Kumar, Pek offers an overview of his research into principle two.
He explains that while “co-ops have an element of direct democracy”, the principle of democratic member control can be a challenge for some large co-ops. Pek thinks principle three – member economic participation – is the most important of the seven co-operative principles. And, as someone born in Canada who used to be a member of the Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), he witnessed first-hand the impact of poor member engagement, which, in MEC’s case, led to the demutualisation and sale of the business.
In his recent research, Pek focused on rethinking participation by considering specific problems with specific types of participation. During the conversation, he explains how co-operatives could use deliberative mini-publics to improve democratic member control.
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Deliberative mini-publics involve selecting a diverse body of citizens randomly to reason together about an issue. But how would this work in a co-op?
“Imagine you are a consumer co-op, then you get critical feedback on the co-op’s strategy or diversity strategy,” he tells Kumar. “So you could use a stratified lottery to select 24 individuals from the co-op Those could be stratified based on things like their age, their purchasing history, their gender, the level of participation or apathy, anything you think is important to that topic.
“They could then be brought together online or in-person to learn from stakeholders like the board or the management and then other experts on sustainability and the co-operative sector, to then offer critical feedback and priorities on what we changed, and those could be fed to management and the board and the membership, for example.”
Pek also emphasises the role of education in ensuring members can effectively engage with outputs such as deliberative mini-publics.
“Ideally we would have a more active, deliberative and participatory membership,“ he adds, “so that when people are given the opportunity to join a mini-public, they’d be thrilled to do so. They had all the educational opportunities they need in the mini public and then when they get those outputs, they know exactly what to do with them and how to interpret them.”
The full interview is available here.
