Journal of Co-operative Studies Vol 35 No 3

Short articles

Protecting public and community assets

Cliff Mills, pp. 147-159

It is currently not possible to protect public or community assets in a corporate entity (apart from a charity), so that they are safe and can remain committed to a social purpose.
There are strong reasons why this situation should be addressed, one reason being the need to provide an appropriate corporate vehicle for delivering public services and for new social enterprises. The situation can be addressed by limited change to legislation covering industrial and provident societies. In the Parliamentary debates on the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 2002, the Government expressed support for achieving this objective.

Collecting co-operative archives: The South East experience

Peter Collier, pp. 160-166

The establishment of the National Co-operative Archive created for a while a flurry of interest in the preservation of co-operative records, and this interest has re­ appeared in the pages of the Co-operative News. This short paper gives an overview of the major archive created by Ron Roffey, a former Secretary of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, together with some reflections on its future. It supplements this survey with additional information concerning other archival activity in the area.

Peer reviewed articles

Socialism, liberalism or political neutrality? The balancing act of the consumer co-operatives in Inter-war Norway

Iselin Theien, pp. 167-182

This article explores the political manoeuvring of the Norwegian union of consumer  co-operatives - NKL - in the period prior to the second world war, with particular attention devoted to the 1930s. One of the most pressing issues the NKL was faced with in this period was how far the co-operative movement would be able to stay out of party politics and, moreover, of the expanding realm of state regulations. The co-operative principle of political neutrality was challenged at the inception of the 1930s when the Labour movement attempted to integrate the NKL as a 'third pillar' of socialism. Later in the decade, political planners of both Liberal and Socialist origins opened up for increased state supervision of the consumer co-operatives as part of a proposed anti-trust legislation. The ensuing debate regarding the position of the consumer co-operatives in relation to the political sphere brought the NKL to the core of the broader debates of the era surrounding the fate of liberal democracy

Using social accounting to show the value added of co-operatives: The expanded value added statement

Laurie Mook, Betty Jane Richmond and Jack Quarter, pp. 183-204

This paper discusses how a Value Added Statement can be adapted so as to take into consideration a fuller range of impacts produced by a co-operative. The conceptual framework used is that of social accounting, defined as "a systematic analysis of the effects of an organisation on its communities of interest or stakeholders, with stakeholder input as part of the data that are analysed for the accounting statement". 1 Value Added Statements rely on the information from financial statements but do not include nonmonetised contributions such as member services to the organisation and volunteering. This paper shows how the Value Added Statement can be expanded to produce an Expanded Value Added Statement that includes an imputed value for nonmonetised contributions that normally are excluded from a Value Added Statement. The example used is that of a student housing co-operative, but the principles can be applied to co-operatives more generally.