Strategic Change in the Evolution of Cooperatives

Economic and social development is usually slow and stable. So has been the evolution of cooperative enterprises in general. Every now and then there exist, however, times of change; revolutionary phases in the evolutionary process. These are the times when history is broken and new history is made. I call these phases the ’times of strategic change’, which means in this presentation changes in the fundamental rules of business and the principles of management. Two previous presentations have dealt with such revolutionary phases in the history of cooperatives. Antti Kuusterä described the period of the emergence of cooperative banking more than one hundred years ago. In Finland it was the time, when merchant economy was transformed into industrial economy (cf. Tainio, 1990). Gert van Dijk, on the other hand, dealt with more recent changes in cooperatives’ competitive environment in Europe. These changes seem to be related to the current transformation of an industrial economy to something that is often called ’post-industrial society’. The word is mostly loosely used in the literature and its precise meaning is seldom clearly defined. Van Dijk, however, perceptively demonstrated that we have reached the end of old certainties of production-driven competition in isolated markets, and we are experiencing the emergence of new rules of ’extended competition’ around integrated markets and investment behaviour.