ABSTRACT
Globally, consumer co-operation has experienced a difficult period since the 1970s. Large scale failures in France, Germany and Austria were accompanied by loss of market share in the UK (including the failure of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society and its takeover by its English counterpart). Even in the Nordic countries, where consumer co-operation has always been more robust, new challenges from the non-co-operative sector had to be confronted. How did co-operative organizations in different countries cope with these challenges? What were the processes of strategic renewal that they undertook? How successful were they? These are the key questions that the collection will address, culminating in an analysis by the editors of the effectiveness of strategic renewal in the co-operative sector. This book is a study of strategic renewal in the consumer co-operative sector, using eleven international case-studies to demonstrate how the concept has been applied over the last fifty years.
Chapters 2 and 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part one|80 pages
Scandinavia
chapter 2|16 pages
The darker Finnish consumer co-operative story
chapter 4|19 pages
When strategic renewal fails
chapter 5|18 pages
From the fall of Coop Norden to ‘long-term boringness’
part two|52 pages
Europe
chapter 8|21 pages
The case of Coop Consumatori, Italy
part three|78 pages
Rest of the World
chapter 11|16 pages
Co-operative identity, participation and sustainability
part four|12 pages
Conclusion