Manx Co-operative Society hosts talk on the rise, fall and revival of the Co-op.
In support of the United Nations declaring 2012 the International Year of Co-operatives the Manx Co-operative Society hosted a talk by Dr Tony Webster, subject leader in history at Liverpool John Moores University on the theme Celebrating our Heritage at the Manx Museum on Thursday, February 16.
The International Year of Co-operatives aims to highlight the contribution of co-operatives to socio-economic development. Dr Webster’s talk traced the history of the world’s largest consumer co-operative from the 1800s through to the present day, drawing on a wealth of archive material he and his research colleagues Professor John Wilson and Rachael Vorberg-Rugh from the University of Liverpool are gathering to produce the first business history of the English Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and the Co-operative Group from 1863 to 2013 to coincide with the CWS’s 150th anniversary.
Introducing Dr Webster Co-operative affairs and democratic services manager Chris Boyd said that more than 1 billion people were members of co-operatives. He explained that 2012 promised to be ‘a very special year’ when the movement would be promoting how co-operative enterprises’ values and principles can help ‘build a better world’.
In his talk Dr Webster referred to the misplaced ‘cloth cap’ perception of the CWS and how the research he and his colleagues were undertaking was aimed at highlighting co-operatives as a proven robust business model with the rigour to face the current challenges brought about by the global financial downturn.
Dr Webster spoke of the early tensions between the CWS and Co-operative societies when the former aspired to be the main supplier to the latter, before developing into an innovator in national retailing and becoming a pioneer in the concept of brand identity using imagery that appealed to people’s ‘hearts and artistic senses’.
The movement’s ‘strong sense of local community’ saw the Manx Co-operative Society formed in 1920 and the CWS going on to become a ‘highly sophisticated’ international organisation trading across continents, ‘ahead of the game’ in matters of employee training which it pioneered in the late 19th century.
The movement began to lose ground after the Second World War. Dr Webster explained: ‘The Co-op lost its way not because of bad leadership but because its democratic nature became a barrier to development.’ The Co-op Bank remained commercially successful, however, and by the 1980s the need for reform was recognised. Restructuring in the 1990s began a sustained recovery that, in particular, had seen the Co-operative Group’s financial services activities flourish and returned, said Dr Webster, ‘the co-operative business model, with its relevance to today’s “Big Society” policy, to the intellectual and political mainstream.’
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