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Cooperative movement has roots in all sectors in the U.K., says expert

Simon Cox

KOCHI: The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom has spread its roots in banking, insurance, pharmacy, dairy farms and food stores. And in funeral care or end of life planning services, the Group is a market leader.

These are both business opportunities and enduring statements for the ethical values that the Co-operative Movement wants to reassert in a world that is, more than ever before, driven by the profit motive.

How to leverage people’s interest in ethical values and good green business to help the cooperative movement flourish is what Simon Cox of the Co-operative Group is interested in. He was in the city as a speaker at the State Co-operative Congress that ended on Sunday.

The Co-operative Group, he said, recently merged with The United Co-ops making it one of the largest consumer co-operatives in the world with $16 billion in revenue, 4,500 branches and stores and 4.5 million members.

An example of what Mr. Cox says is achieving scale and localisation, using the latest technology and the eagerness of a large section of society that wants corporates to be socially and ethically responsible.

“It is time for cooperatives all over the globe to come together in an “international co-operative intranet to share knowledge and may be imagination,” says Mr. Cox. Though the cooperative movement has “huge global scale in aggregate, our organisations are currently completely un-integrated This is a big hindrance to the cooperative groups competing with organisations that are relentlessly driven by profit growth “to deliver real value to our customers and members,” says Mr. Cox.

He suggests that co-operatives share service centres for banking platforms, optimise cooperative supply chains, leverage global buying power and work around common branding.

Globalisation isn’t new. It is just happens to have picked up tremendous momentum of late, spurred by new communication technologies that have created virtual community groups on the worldwide web.

The cooperative movement should use these new technologies to serve its purposes in the third phase of globalisation where it is globalisation by individuals, says Mr. Cox.

He says that cooperatives should take advantage of the social networking groups and use the underlying technology for the spread of the cooperative objectives. Mr. Cox has also been inspired by the success of Wipro, Infosys and TCS “which are leading the way in outsourced services.”

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