Academic Press Waking the Asian Pacific Co-operative Potential: How Co-operative Firms Started, Overcame Challenges, and Addressed Poverty Across the Asia Pacific

Replete with case studies, Waking the Asian Pacific Cooperative Potential applies a novel theoretical framework to aid in understanding meaningful change in cooperative firms, mutual firms, collectives, and communes, focusing in particular on the underexamined Asia Pacific region. It explores the common, albeit competing, objectives of transformational cooperatives that deliver a range of social benefits and corporative coops where the cooperative exhibits the characteristics of a competitive investor firm. The book provides examples of successful cooperatives in eleven countries across the Asia Pacific and reviews the theoretical framework of cooperatives, including issues pertaining to socio-economic, politico-legal, and domestic and international factors. Waking the Asian Pacific Co-operative Potential provides early-career researchers and graduate students with a systematic resource of cooperatives in the Asia Pacific, highlighting core lessons from case studies regarding the ideal role of cooperatives in a modern economy and on the enabling factors of the role of the state, the market potential for scale-up, the mitigation of poverty, and civil society. Review "Despite the above-mentioned limitations, the rich contributions of this book to the academic and political fields are obvious. This book successfully demonstrates the potential of cooperative movements. Using this book as a bridgehead, the international academia can further analyze the new role of cooperative movements." --Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development "Thirty-four papers review how cooperatives across the Asia-Pacific region have overcome difficulties, succeeded, and also failed, explaining how the cooperative model works and what it can contribute to the sustainable development of the economy, society, and the environment." --Journal of Economic Literature "Much of the literature on co-operatives relies upon their experience in Europe and North America. This book is a welcome contrast that expands our knowledge to Asia. Written by well-informed researchers, this volume broadens our understanding and provides new insights into the co-operative form of organization. I strongly recommend this book both to the co-operative community and to those looking for new ideas to re-invigorate the workplace." --John Pencavel "In every country, co-operatives have their own unique history, having evolved under different institutional frameworks. The resulting complexity is not easy to untangle, yet it is only by systematic comparison between countries that we can learn what factors make for success, identify best practice and engage in that most vital activity - mutual learning. That is what makes this book so important; it takes a whole world region and enables the experts on each type of cooperative, in each country, to present case studies that make systematic comparison possible. The result will be to waken the ‘cooperative potential’ on which the livelihoods of so many low income people will depend." --Johnston Birchall Review Explores how cooperative organizations, collective firms, mutual firms, and credit unions emerged, survived, and thrived across the Asia Pacific region About the Author Morris Altman is the Dean of the University of Dundee Business School, Dundee, UK, and a chair professor of behavioural and institutional economics, and cooperatives. He is also an emeritus professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He earned his PhD in economics from McGill University in 1984. A former visiting scholar at Cambridge University, Cornell University, Duke University, Hebrew University, Stirling University, and Stanford University, he served as an editor of the Journal of Socio-Economics for 10 years and is co-founder of Review of Behavioral Economics and is the founding editor of the Elsevier book series, Perspectives on Behavioral Economics and the Economics of Behavior. Dr. Altman