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Keynote presentation to Association of Cooperative Educators (ACE), Canadian Association for Studies
in Co-operation (CASC), and International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) Research Committee
Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities,
University of Saskatchewan 29 May 2007
by Brett Fairbairn, Professor of History
Centre for the Study of Co-operatives – University of Saskatchewan
101 Diefenbaker Place – Saskatoon SK S7N 5B8 Canada
tel. (306) 966-8505 fax (306) 966-8517
e-mail brett.fairbairn@usask.ca <http://coop-studies.usask.ca>
In the room today we have a remarkable mixture of academics and practitioners from across North America and throughout the world. All of us are coming together today to begin considering co-operation, innovation, and the social economy – the keywords for our dialogues. Yet while these will be common threads in our many conversations over the next four days, each of us brings different levels of familiarity with various aspects of these topics. We are meeting in Saskatchewan, a very particular place with which some of you are deeply familiar, while others are likely here for the first time. Some of you are specialists in the topic of the social economy, while to others it is no doubt an unfamiliar new term. Some, again, will be familiar with co-operatives and co-operation, while others will have experience with different kinds of social enterprises.
These circumstances make clear, I think, what my job is in this opening plenary. In keeping with the overall 2007 congress theme, “Bridging Communities: Making public knowledge / Making knowledge public,” I aim to build some bridges and facilitate the sharing of knowledge: to introduce Saskatchewan and its social economy to those of you who are newly here; to place Saskatchewan’s experience into a North American and international context, so as to bring out some connections between Saskatchewan and other parts of the world from which many of you have come; to relate co-operatives, co-operation, and the social economy to each other; and, finally, to sketch, at least in a preliminary way, how we might begin to have a conversation about innovation. Along the way, I also want to link our theme of social economy to the other overarching conference themes, Women as Global Citizens and Partnerships with Aboriginal Peoples.
I have chosen to organize my remarks around two themes, those of Place and Imagination.
Let me begin by inviting you to think about the importance of place in today’s world, beginning with this place, right here: in the middle of the northern Great Plains of North America; beside an important transportation route, the South Saskatchewan River; atop a high bank that a century ago was a grassy, windswept bluff.
A university was established right here in 1907, its first building constructed shortly thereafter a couple of hundred metres from where we stand. It rose out of the long prairie grasses like an apparition, its heavy “collegiate gothic” architecture a calculated contrast to the wide-open Prairies that had been marked for untold millennia by bison and tipis. What we now call the College Building, a fascinating heritage structure, stands opposite us at the far end of “The Bowl,” and I encourage you to wander its halls, and to reflect as you do on the nature of early 20th-century globalization. Windows, steps, doorways, and staircases speak to the attempted transplantation of a foreign world to these Prairies; the walls memorialize young men who served, were injured, or died far across the ocean in a war fought by now-vanished empires. Nearby, you will find a three-quarters quadrangle, an architectural quotation of Oxford constructed in the middle of Prairie grasses.
This university symbolizes the contact, clash, and ongoing reconciliation between two worlds, a process that has also generated and driven Saskatchewan’s unique social economy.
The First Nations people who inhabited these plains for uncounted millennia possessed, it is important to say, a social economy, in the sense that economic activities were embedded in society and culture, were consistent with community beliefs and institutions, and were sustained over vast stretches of time. The first peoples who lived here demonstrably practised social and environmental sustainability, which more recent social-economic systems have only claimed or imagined.
This is not to say that the Native cultures of the Prairies were static: quite the opposite. They traded over vast distances, negotiated agreements, maintained relationships and alliances. They showed almost unbelievable tenacity in surviving calamities such as the wave of diseases that emanated from European contact – diseases that reduced populations across North America by up to 95 per cent. In the wake of contact, First Nations and Métis people adopted and incorporated new technologies from horse transportation to steel, and used their local knowledge and skills to build a new, globally oriented economy centred on the export of furs to Europe. One would have to conclude that adaptability, flexibility, negotiation, and resilience were key features of Aboriginal societies.
What nearly broke the back of local Indigenous societies was not European contact, explorers, missionaries, or trade as such, but rather the industry-driven globalization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Railroads, settlers, commercial export agriculture, and the construction of a Canadian nation-state had massive and unprecedented impacts. The railroad came to Saskatchewan in the 1880s, and the settlement flood rose to a peak before the First World War. Many settlers came directly from Europe, not only from Britain and France but from Central and Eastern Europe as well, making Saskatchewan the only province in Canada where English and French descendants added together are not a majority. Many other settlers were of European heritage, but came here from central Canada or the United States. With the filling of the American West, this was the “Last Best West,” and American settlers were often successful because of their prior experience with dryland Prairie agriculture.
First Nations leaders, looking ahead, signed important treaties with the British Crown, retaining selected lands and receiving promises of assistance in exchange for agreeing for the bulk of the lands to be opened for settlement. These treaties, many of which were negotiated in the 1880s, remain an enduring framework for relations between First Nations people and other Canadians today. I have mentioned that First Nations and Métis people were adaptable and had been successful in commerce. Some far-seeing leaders foresaw the need for their people to be involved in the new economic order of commercialized agriculture. Sadly, their visionary initiatives were blocked by autocratic government officials and competitive non-Aboriginal farmers who wanted the good land.
The settlers might have learned much from the Aboriginal peoples who lived here. They might have learned that the driest expanses were not well-suited to fixed settlement and crops. They might have learned that, in the dry areas, settlements and agriculture should be oriented around access to water. There were, indeed, instances in which the settlers listened to Aboriginal advice. The city of Saskatoon is located where it is because Chief Whitecap of the nearby Dakota first nation advised the settlers where to build.(1) But in general, the Canadian government imposed and the settlers followed an alien, geometric landscape of uniform settlement in perfect squares, one farm family to a quarter section, and lands set aside to reward the railroad and to build schools. This geometric grid, adopted from the United States, represented a Jeffersonian political conception in which autonomous democratic citizens would be created by giving each one an independent land base. Nothing could better represent Euro-American ideas of Enlightenment, order, and individualistic citizenship than the state-enforced creation of a geometric landscape on these plains. It was a liberal-individualistic utopian experiment – unsustainable under the actual circumstances of its place and time.
One might assume that the only important fault line would be that between the colonizers and the colonized; yet, while that fault line is fundamental to the province’s history as it is for other colonized regions of the world, conflicts within the settler society were also powerful. In fact, the conflicts between what might be called small and large colonizers led to the creation of a new social economy among the settlers. A large part of the new population of Saskatchewan learned the hard way that corporate enterprise and state institutions were not enough; that organizations had to be adapted and invented to fit the geographic and social realities. Faced with isolation, harsh climate, distant markets, private monopolies, and unresponsive public powers, ordinary settlers had to create an economy for themselves that was sustainable under the social and environmental conditions that they had faced. Much like the First Nations people before them, they discovered co-operation as a key approach to surviving here; but they developed it in new forms that were suited to the mass-industrial economy.
Settlers co-operated to build a basic social infrastructure: roads, schools. Country schoolhouses were communally operated by the nearby farm families, and often the schoolhouse became the focal point for further stages of community development. Co-operation emerged in the biggest industry, agriculture, the critical source of both food and income for the settler families. Dairy co-operatives are said to be the earliest forms that emerged in what is now Saskatchewan, in the 1890s even before the province was created. Co-operative purchasing associations and co-operative elevators followed. Political and educational unions of farmers such as the Saskatchewan Grain Growers’ Association of 1905 were accompanied by efforts for co-operative marketing. Saskatchewan farmers were leaders in creating the Grain Growers’ Grain Company of 1906, and the drive to organize marketing culminated in the 1920s in the creation of the Prairie Wheat Pools, co-operatives that were so huge in scale that they became dominant players for a time in international commodity markets. Representatives of the consumer-based British and international co-operative movements had to investigate the producer-based Canadian pools to satisfy themselves that they were genuine co-operatives. A generation of efforts by farmers created institutions that have dominated agriculture to the present day, although the descendants of those early co-operatives, today, are investor-owned private firms and government marketing boards.
Settlers strove to organize marketing out of a desire to combat monopolies and out of confidence in their own collective power. That confidence, however, was shattered by the crushing impact of the 1930s in Saskatchewan, which saw twin economic and environmental catastrophes. Faced with a second and even greater challenge after the settlement era itself, Saskatchewan people created new kinds of co-operation, and with them, a social economy that broadened from commercial agrarianism to embrace the many-faceted lives and needs of people in communities. Consumer co-operatives spread in the Depression, and credit unions were introduced and took root. These forms of co-operatives became cornerstones of rural communities, spreading almost pervasively throughout the province. Today, in many rural communities that have declined and struggled almost continuously since the 1930s, the CO-OP store and the credit union are the key remaining local businesses; while in larger centres, they remain the only locally-owned and /oriented enterprises among a field of national and transnational competitors.
The early co-operatives were created almost entirely within spheres of society that were then considered the domain of men: spheres such as business, representation, and formal leadership. Men overwhelmingly dominated the leadership positions, even though women were of fundamental importance to many of the co-operatives. Women organized, urged, and supported co-operatives. Women’s networks, activities, and community leadership provided a large part of the social capital with which new co-operatives were organized. In the general consumer types of co-operatives, they constituted a large part of the customer base and workforce, without which the co-operatives could hardly have functioned. But even in the commercial agrarian co-operatives, women were surprisingly present as organizers, speakers, and participants in meetings, even though the official minutes did not always record that they were present. More acceptable at that time was for separate women’s organizations to be created, through which women could exert their influence and groom themselves for possible leadership positions. Women’s sections and women’s guilds were important organizations for co-operatives because they conducted educational and promotional activities; they were important organizations for women because they offered one of the only platforms in society where women – at that time, mainly relatively well-off Anglo-Saxon women – could rise to public prominence. It is no accident that several of Canada’s first women who became prominent in public life and politics came through the agrarian co-operative movement to do so. While this was a success for women given the circumstances of the times, it remained for a very tentative and partial success. For the most part, women’s contributions were not honoured and women leaders were not respected. Nevertheless, as time went on, women became more and more prominent, especially in newer kinds of co-operatives.
Later waves of co-operatives were created largely on the foundations provided by the early marketing, purchasing, and credit co-operatives. Rural production and machinery-sharing co-ops, community health clinics, co-operative community halls and facilities, housing co-ops, childcare co-ops, worker co-ops, a large telecommunications co-operative, youth co-ops, and many others emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. In many cases the new co-ops drew on legislative models, leaders, and inspiration provided by the earlier co-operatives. The idea of a co-operative even more so even than the word co-operative became embedded in popular understanding, so that, when faced by a community crisis or community need, local leaders often think of banding together to create a democratic association to operate an enterprise for their own use.(2) One of our latest examples here in Saskatoon is the Station 20 West project, a community enterprise centre whose development is being led by Quint Development Corporation, CHEP Good Food Inc., and other community-based groups, and which incorporates co-operatives into its plans.
But while co-operatives have been especially prominent in Saskatchewan’s social economy, they have never been the only social enterprises. A range of other nonprofits and associations have also provided services in Saskatchewan cities, towns, reserves, Northern, and rural areas. Generally speaking, they were not organized as a sector with their own common identity and voice. We need only think of the YMCA and YWCA – established in Saskatoon in 1908 and 1910 (3) – and many other agencies providing cultural, recreational, and social services with commercial elements. Various religious, charitable, and communitarian impulses lay behind the creation and development of all manner of social enterprises. The co-operative movement existed alongside and in symbiosis with these spiritual and social impulses, and was merely the most economically well-organized and visible arm of broader movements for community improvement.
The Station 20 West project also illustrates how the social economy in Saskatchewan, though it incorporates co-operatives, is also driven by other impulses and other forms of organization of people and resources. Quint Development Corporation, for example, is a community-based organization developed in 1995 by people in five core neighborhoods in west-central Saskatoon, neighborhoods that were neglected by economic development
and government policy.(4) Quint has supported housing co-operatives, employment creation, and many other neighborhood development projects. It serves as a representative, for our purposes, of a second broad movement that forms part of the social economy in Saskatchewan: the community economic development or CED movement.
CED has emerged, as elsewhere in North America, as a response to a persistent set of issues centring on
geographically concentrated poverty, inequality, and marginalization. Some of the dynamics, such as social exclusions based on class, race, and gender, are deeply rooted and long-lasting; but many of the regional dynamics are driven by recent waves of urbanization and globalization that have seen jobs and income concentrated in some communities and drained from others. In Saskatchewan community development was long perceived as an issue mainly of remote Northern and rural communities, hard-hit by international markets and crises of resource-based industries; but as Saskatchewan has continued to urbanize, there has been a growing awareness of urban social issues as well.
Since about the 1970s, CED approaches have become evident in many communities, supported in some cases by federal, provincial, and municipal government policies, but driven by citizens in the communities. Community Futures Development Corporations, Rural Development Corporations, Neighborhood Development Corporations, and many other groups are aspects of this approach to economic revitalization. In the 1990s the practitioners and advocates of CED became much better-organized with the creation of a provincial section of the Community Development Society, a Saskatchewan Council for Community Development, a Saskatchewan Economic Developers’ Association, and of the Canadian CED Network as a nation-wide umbrella organization in which Saskatchewan participates. The vitality of CED initiatives and their growing organization in the last decade or two make it appropriate to view CED organizations as a second component of the social economy in Saskatchewan.
And like most co-operatives, community economic development is conceptualized around localities. The Canadian CED Network says that “CED can be defined as action by people locally to create economic opportunities and enhance social conditions in their communities on a sustainable and inclusive basis, particularly with those who are most disadvantaged.”(5) CED is inclusion, action, and social improvement centred around locality.
First Nations and Métis people have also developed, in recent decades, their own distinctive approaches to wedding economic development with social sustainability. Since the lowest point of Aboriginal status and hope, which we can likely date to the 1940s, Aboriginal people have forged stronger and stronger institutions and are today enjoying a resurgence in population, pride, and influence. This development has followed its own trajectory that has centred on the drive for self-determination and self-government on the basis of the historic treaties, which today are understood as permanent, constitutive frameworks for relations between the descendants of the first peoples and the settlers. Economic development has been pursued in concert with the drive for Aboriginal self-government, and has taken distinctive forms such as band-owned development corporations – the La Ronge band’s Kitsaki Development Corporation, created in 1980, is often cited as an example – and urban reserves, such as the pioneering Muskeg Lake First Nation urban reserve negotiated in 1984-93 and now located at the east end of Saskatoon.(6) Aboriginal economic development is distinct in its conceptualization of the relationships among economic organizations, Aboriginal communities, and Aboriginal governments. Band ownership is common and is seen as essential to preserving community autonomy and unity. New forms of co-operatives are being considered where co-operative and band membership would be congruent. At this point in time the dynamics and the structures are clearly distinct. Aboriginal development also has its own networks, including its own association of development officers, CANDO.(7)
While co-operatives, community economic development, and Aboriginal economic development do overlap and interconnect, the social economy in this place can be seen as largely a combination of the three elements. In this, its shape and structure reflect the early settlement history, the recent urbanization and globalization, and the renewed Aboriginal character of the region. The three movements have in common that they were created from need and from practical experimentation, borrowing freely from models elsewhere but developing them in locally based, grassroots ways. Not surprisingly for developments that have proceeded in this way, they have all struggled to define their identity as movements and to make that identity understood by others.
With Canada’s social-economy initiatives in recent years, and with the example of Québec as a model, we now face a new question: to what extent it is advantageous to think of and refer to such initiatives under the common rubric of social economy, which until recently was a new and unfamiliar term?
There are of course various ways to define social economy: structurally, as a sector consisting of co-operatives, nonprofit associations, and mutual enterprises; normatively, as a sector characterized by principles such as service to member, autonomous management, democratic decision-making, putting people before profit, and participation.(8) I don’t propose to revisit the ongoing and productive debates about what constitutes the social economy. What I do want to do is stress two things. First, the social economy evolves uniquely in every time and place. In this place, Saskatchewan, we can consider it to consist of co-operatives, CED, and Aboriginal economic development. Second, to constitute various movements and initiatives as a social economy requires an act of the imagination. In Anglophone Canada generally, and in Saskatchewan today, we are currently in the midst of such an act of the imagination.
In talking about the importance of place, I have already begun to uncover why imagination is indispensable for those who wish to act and live in a globalizing world. For an effect of globalization, as we have experienced it for at least a couple of hundred years, is that nothing is inherited intact from the past. Everything of value has to be reconceptualized, imagined anew, and asserted under changed and changing conditions.
I have stressed that Place has been of fundamental importance in the development of the movements that constitute what we now call the social economy. But does globalization mean the end of place?
Globalization is a centuries-old process in which the episodes of colonization and industrialism to which I referred earlier were one stage. Today we can conceptualize globalization as being about supra-territorial relations, complex connectivity, and the deterritorialization of processes. Interconnections among places are more extensive, intensive, and rapid than ever before, leading to an enmeshment of the local and global and to the growing influence of global frames of reference.(9)
The changes associated with globalization change the nature of places everywhere, change the nature of place itself. As Castells pointed out, the “flows” that occur in global spaces are more and more the determinants of history: flows of capital, goods, information, and people.(10) Such flows, operating within a global space of flows, are privileged over fixed, traditional communities and the “places” around which such communities typically were formed. Arturo Escobar has noted that when change, agency, and autonomy are associated with global processes, this means local communities are cast as dependent, reactive, and backward.(11) Globalization tells us that place-based communities are traditional, that they may have some nostalgic value, but that they are not meaningful in the global context.
So there is a sense in which globalization eliminates place: not necessarily by eliminating physical places, although it frequently enough does that, too; but more fundamentally by eliminating the meaning of place, by homogenizing places and casting them in roles of passivity and inaction. In the framework favoured by globalization, places lack authenticity, legitimacy, and creative power.
Arif Dirklik has written, “Views of place – that were products of modernity, that produced places as locations for parochialism and changelessness that the inhabitants of places never intended – in the end resulted in an inexorable urge to erase places by incorporating them into the spaces of modernity.” (12)
So re-imagining place is an important part of our project if we wish to empower citizens. But this re-imagination has to take account of sometimes well-justified critiques of the place-based communities of the past. Critics can say that historic communities were backward, regressive, and repressive, and that globalization, with its apparent freedoms of movement, is liberating. We need only think of the experiences of the poor and marginalized, lower classes, Aboriginal people and visible minorities, women, and so on. Individuals sometimes do need to be liberated from community by attaching themselves to global ideas, such as the idea of rights. There is truth in critiques of old-fashioned communities, and such critiques are a reminder that the goal of the social economy is not the restoration of the communities of the past. All the communities that motivate us and that we value are, in effect, new communities, newly imagined in the context of globalization, and different in fundamental ways from anything we have seen before.
These new communities, communities that are appropriate vehicles for social values and liberation, are created , invented, and imagined – and not typically by individual acts of the imagination, but rather by collective imagining mediated by communication.
Communication creates place, community, identity, and the capacity to act.
Arjun Appadurai has said, “It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, or moral economics and unjust rule. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.”(13)
Imagining new forms of action and autonomy, particularly those that mediate between the “spaces” of globalization and the “places” where people live and work, is critical. The social economy is potentially a very important act of imagining in exactly this sense: it unites organizations rooted in communities, and constitutes them as a sector that can engage in national and transnational partnerships as well as policy discussions and interactions with the state. The social economy is a vehicle for elevating our imagination from the level of local action in our communities and connecting it to the level of societies, states, and global frames of reference.
Imagining a social economy – creating it as a platform for action – has been a slow process in Anglophone Canada. Community leaders who have spent lifetimes building movements and organizations, struggling to have them recognized by governments, citizens, and financial institutions, are reluctant to abandon the socio-economic brands in which they have invested. This is understandable. It is by no means certain that the term social economy will “stick” as the leading or defining term for what Canadians do in their communities. But at a minimum, the idea of social economy is adding to the repertoire of concepts available to activists, researchers, and organizations. In Saskatchewan and elsewhere, the social economy already has one significant accomplishment to its credit: it has built new bridges between movements, between regions, and between practitioners and academics, such as we see here today.
Imagination may sound abstract, but it isn’t, really. We live in an age that calls for mental dexterity, in which there is no meaningful action except when it is combined with imagination. Communities are not inherited unchanged from the past, but are continuously created as we combine imagination with action in appropriate ways, as we develop new mechanisms, structures, organizations, services, and alliances to express our values and identities under present-day circumstances. Even in those instances where our aim is to preserve communities and reassert historic values, we preserve and reassert through carefully chosen innovations.
In many respects, innovation is a word that has been captured by spokespersons for business and technology. But of course not only businesses and engineers innovate; we need to draw attention to and understand the innovations that are generated by the social economy. And not all innovations are commercial or technological in character. There are also social innovations to consider.
What might we learn from considering how businesses innovate, and what is different in the social economy? This is a fruitful field for discussion. Let me begin such a discussion by tossing out a few observations. First, studies of innovation tell us we must distinguish between the creation of innovations and their diffusion. The original act of creation is a unique one that is often followed, in cases of highly successful innovations, by communication, imitation, and replication of innovations along networks. We might wish to think of the social economy as a network, one of whose purposes is the identification and diffusion of innovations. But where do innovations come from? In business and management studies, a lot of research used to focus on technological, technical, and structural determinants of innovation including specialization, professionalization, scale, centralization, complexity, and technical knowledge. But newer research – and this is a second observation I wish to highlight – often stresses that to understand innovation, we must consider broad changes in organizations and society using interdisciplinary approaches. I want to return to this theme, of interdisciplinary knowledge, later. Finally, organizational culture, not just structure, is increasingly considered essential to innovation. To apply this idea to the social economy, we should be very interested in what kind of cultures are conducive to innovation within social-economy organizations and enterprises.
While the emphasis on organizational culture is quite relevant to the social economy, it is striking how little research has been done in the English language specifically on innovation in this sector. I searched for titles related to “innovation” in the catalogue of our university research library, and found over 1,600 “hits.” But the combination of “innovation” with “nonprofit” produced only 8, and “social innovation” only 5. There is a small but growing subset of the innovation literature that deals with innovations in social sectors and services, but we as practitioners and researchers have a lot of work to do if we want to understand innovation in the social economy.
Within Canada a rich francophone literature has been developed by the CRISES research centre on social innovations.(14) Denis Harrisson positions social innovation as the outcome of co-operation among diverse actors who are concerned about solving some problem. Social-economy enterprises are especially good vehicles for such innovations because they explicitly acknowledge a social dimension to their activities: they innovate based either on identification of needs unmet by markets and governments, or their imagination of a different type of society. Need, that is to say, is the mother of invention, while the midwife is communication among stakeholders. Social innovation typically originates from the exchange of information and knowledge among heterogeneous but interdependent actors. Innovation in the social-economy setting depends critically on institutional arrangements and relationships that allow for considerable autonomy and interaction among codependent actors. If social-economy organizations indeed have unique capacities for innovation, these almost certainly have their roots in democratic governance frameworks that are open and flexible enough to accommodate multiple stakeholder interests.
So to summarize: to think about innovation, we need to think about networks, interdisciplinarity, and organizational culture. We need to think about unmet needs and about the dynamics of interactions among autonomous and codependent actors. We need to think about democratic governance frameworks engaging multiple stakeholders. And I would add two more words: we need to think about leadership and entrepreneurship, and the forms of both that are suited to innovation in the social economy.
Recently I was reading, in another context, about “post-heroic leadership” – an interesting concept, and one which, I wonder, might suit not only the present age of the world, but the social economy in particular.
Such a concept is both new and old. While there are deep traditions of consensus and collaboration in the movements that now comprise the social economy, it is also true that many of our movements and organizations were built by leaders of the heroic mould.
It is common in our day to lament the lack of heroic leaders in politics and society. This lament seems to me to give rise to a peculiar disempowerment, in which the endless wait for a leader who will change things – a form of revolutionary attentisme, if you will forgive the phrase – becomes a grounds for inaction. Imagination is called for, not just to imagine a different leader, but to imagine more fully a different kind of leadership.
Leaders and entrepreneurs in the social economy share many attributes common to other entrepreneurs, most notably a willingness to take risks and an ability to communicate shared goals. In the context of social-economy organizations, they need to be able to function in a group environment, collaborate, use networks, access and build social capital, and deal with a wide range of partners often including governments, financial institutions, and community groups that all provide different critical resources. You could say this requires a more diverse skill set than what is required of a leader in a corporate setting. Or, you could say that it involves the same kinds of skills that are increasingly called for in government and business. Possibly other sectors should be looking to the social economy for their models of leadership, rather than the reverse.
An EMES study in Europe found that entrepreneurship in the social economy does not conform to a “heroic
individualist” model, but instead is typically a joint undertaking of a leader plus supporters, or of a team. Entrepreneurial activity occurs within circles that extend outward through a wide group of external stakeholders, often crossing conventional boundaries such as that between the public and private sectors. Entrepreneurs depend on social capital to access the wider circle, and often need to pay attention to reciprocation in order to maintain the social capital upon which they depend.(15)
So leadership in the social economy is different: probably always has been, but certainly is now. Perhaps it is, especially, up to the social economy to delve into its repertoire of practices to articulate an alternative vision of leadership, one that is collaborative and networked. The complexities of the challenges we face, the multiplicities of our identities and affiliations, the richness of our imaginings surely go beyond what any one leader can embody. The innovation that is urgently required in our societies today, and which the social economy can help provide, is innovation through group action: through co-operation; and the leaders we need, in communities and in public life, are the ones who can facilitate and focus such action.
So let’s think about, investigate, and – perhaps, if it fits – embrace that concept of post-heroic leadership as we develop our thinking and communicate our ideas and imaginings over the next several days.
Leadership, like place, is something that has to be re-imagined in the contemporary world. There is a parallel challenge for academics, for university-based researchers and students, that is no less difficult in its way than the challenges of imagination faced by community leaders. As this conference is in part a scholarly one, and unites academics with practitioners, I would like to dwell for a moment on the particular challenge for the academy. It has an eight-syllable jawcracker of a name, a name that evokes excitement in some and aversion in others. I speak of interdisciplinarity.
Advocates of co-operatives and community development observed decades ago that the interests and needs of communities are holistic, interdependent, inherently interdisciplinary. Generally speaking, no one discipline can answer the questions that matter most for communities. Yet while this has been known for generations, progress in interdisciplinary understanding in the academy has been glacial and too often remains the work of scattered individuals.
The lives, careers, and identities of graduate students and academics, at least until very recently, remained tied to disciplines, departments, disciplinary journals and professional associations, and all the other segmented and compartmentalized apparatus of scholarly life. As a result, Lisa Lattuca – who interviewed academics about interdisciplinarity and published her results in 2001 – found a “pervasive fear” that interdisciplinary work would be undervalued by colleagues.(16) I think things have improved since 2001, but I wonder how much.
Well, we are meeting here today as an interdisciplinary assembly, and I would hazard that one of our tasks is to value and honour each other’s interdisciplinary work. Another is to broaden and deepen our understanding of what interdisciplinarity is.
Lattuca groups ideas about interdisciplinarity into three categories that she terms synthetic interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and conceptual interdisciplinarity, in increasing order of sophistication. She uses these concepts to group and map other concepts used by various academics and writers.(17)
Synthetic interdisciplinarity: Instrumental or cross-disciplinarity that is motivated by an interdisciplinary
question
Multidisciplinarity
Partial interdisciplinarity
Conceptual interdisciplinarity / Transdisciplinarity / Transdisciplinarity
Cross-disciplinarity / Conceptual interdisciplinarity / (True) interdisciplinarity
Critical interdisciplinarity
Full interdisciplinarity
At the top is the simple borrowing of ideas between disciplines (instrumental interdisciplinarity), as is parallel work by people within different disciplines who are addressing a common theme (multidisciplinarity).
The middle level, what Lattuca calls transdisciplinarity, is about developing bodies of knowledge that are not based within disciplines. At a minimum, it seems to me, we as participants in conferences and networks like this one should be aiming to create a transdisciplinary body of knowledge about the social economy.
Arguably the most intensive expression of interdisciplinarity is at the bottom of the chart, the development of bodies of knowledge and understanding that allow for conscious critiques of disciplines and of their forms of knowledge. So let me hold that out as the highest possible aim of our exchanges over the next four days: to develop our understandings in ways that go beyond working in parallel in our separate disciplines; that not only have life and understanding between the disciplines, but that reflect back upon, inform, and transform our disciplines through our work.
In this, community research partners have a key role to play. Just as need provokes social invention, it also provokes academic imagination. Practitioners, leaders, and ordinary people in the social economy pose questions that require interdisciplinary answers. If academics listen closely, communities will provide a roadmap toward transformative interdisciplinary understandings.
A sense of place that is empowering. Imagination that is linked to action. Knowledge that crosses boundaries. Those are themes I recommend to you to guide our explorations and discussions.
We live in an age when we are challenged to discover histories, invent traditions, and imagine communities like never before, both inside the academy and in communities. The social economy, like community, is an act of the imagination. Meeting here in Anglophone Canada, we are meeting in a time and place when the process of imagining the social economy is in many respects just underway. It is not too much to hope that conferences like this one will influence the social economy and the forms that it will take both here and elsewhere.
Innovations are called for across the community-university divide, across the public-private divide, across community boundaries, across regional and national boundaries. We need to pay attention to networks, cultures of innovation, mutual stakeholder engagement, collaborative leadership and entrepreneurship. To understand these things we need to create interdisciplinary knowledge, transdisciplinary knowledge, knowledge that transforms our disciplines.
Co-operative innovation begins here, anew, in your discussions over the next four days.
Member of the Canadian Social Economy Research Partnerships
Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada / Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada
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