Italy has numerous traditions of cooperatives (Ammirato, 1994, 2018). In particular, the Italian coop sector evolved from both secular liberal thought, socialist and communist traditions, as well as from Catholic social thought. They have managed to become a class of principles-based enterprises strongly embedded in all sectors of the Italian economy.
However, within the Italian cooperative movement, a slow transformation has been occurring for decades, partly by necessity and institutional change – for instance, the rise of neoliberalism, the integration of women into the workplace, globalization, etc. – and partly motivated by the evolving needs of ordinary citizens, acting collectively to meet those needs. This article will focus on one particular class of such innovations, the tradition of social and community cooperatives. Using Tinberger’s four questions (Tinberger, 1963) as a framing device, I introduce this tradition below.
Function
The function of social and community cooperatives is to provide citizens with the ability to self-organize the provision of goods and, in particular, services. The initial function of social cooperatives, the first of the two phenomena to emerge, was primarily restricted to providing mental health services or to integrating marginalized communities into the economy. Therefore, while alternative structures might have served to isolate or separate out groups according to proficiency, competency, or even, in the case of the asylum system, according to “sanity”, social cooperatives have operated to diminish distinctions in agency on the part of both individuals and groups that historically have not received such treatment. This includes recipients of mental health care. Thus, a primary function, especially of social cooperatives, has been to shift from what economists call a “principal-agent” model to a model of shared agency.
A second function of both social and community cooperatives derives from their impact on the communities in which they are founded. They tend to facilitate both community building and economic empowerment, though to different degrees. In this vein, community cooperatives have generally been stronger on the issue of community building.
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