Prof. Morris Altman is one of the key authors and editor of the book Waking the Asian Pacific Cooperative Potential. Prof. Altman is the Dean and Chair Professor of Behavioural and Institutional Economics and Cooperatives at the School of Business, University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom. He was formerly Professor and Dean of the Newcastle Business School in Australia.
How did you get involved with the book?
I was invited to give a keynote address by Prof. Akira Kurimoto at the annual ICA-AP Research Committee meeting in Bali in 2015. Dr. Anthony Jensen introduced that idea of a research partnership being formed amongst cooperative researchers in the Asia-Pacific. This eventually led to the formation of the Asian Pacific Cooperative Research Partnership (APCRP). Back in Australia Dr. Jensen initiated discussions with me about what concrete and tangible contributions this alliance might make to ur research community and co-operators in the region. We ended up discussing the possibility of a research book of cooperatives in the Asia-Pacific. This thought was then brought to the attention of the informal executive of the APCRP, chaired by Dr. Jensen. The idea was favourably received, and I volunteered to locate a leading international publisher that might be interested in this project. Elsevier was quite interested, so we collectively put together a book proposal. Akira Korimoto, Robby Tulus, Yashavantha Dongre, Anthony Jensen, and I started things off, and Seungkwon Jang and Balu Iyer were soon invited to join the APCRP executive and play an important role in the project. After much work, our proposal was submitted and accepted by Elsevier.
What was your experience as you interacted with the editors and authors on the book?
This project was an excellent example of collective action with a clearly defined mission. The editors are a great group of open-minded, innovative and hard-working scholars and it has been a pleasure and honour to be part of the collective.
What are the key takeaways from the Asia cooperative experience?
There are many research questions that remain unanswered. This book was an important step in the right direction, that can have significant implications for policy and the wellbeing of Asian-Pacific communities. There is much more work to be done, and the APCRP is well focused on moving forward to develop and facilitate research on cooperatives in the region.
You articulate that cooperative principles and values impact the incentive environment of member-owned organisations, increasing efficiency and incentivising technological change. Could you elaborate on incentivising technological change and the benefits it could provide to members and cooperatives?
As long as cooperatives wish to improve the wellbeing of their members whilst remaining competitive in the market, there is an incentive to innovate how output is produced and delivered, how the firm or coop is managed, the quality of output and the type of output that is produced. In investor owned firms there is often the option to remain competitive by reducing wages, working conditions, reducing the quality of output, or relocating production to low wage parts of the world. Firms will still innovate to remain competitive in what is being produced. But coops have an inbuilt incentive environment based on the desire to improve members’ wellbeing. However, this depends on members maintaining control of their cooperative and not being run by their managers. Maintaining coop principles is critical to maintain member control.
You mention that cultural, ethnic, or religious attributes that are consistent with cooperative principles and values can have a positive effect. Can you give examples from countries where you have seen this?
When culture, ethnicity and religion reinforce cooperative principles they serve to reinforce member control over their destiny and create an environment of cohesiveness and solidarity. But this need not always be the case. And, there can be trade-offs between particular cultural, ethnic, and religious attributes and cooperative principles that can weaken the coop in terms of equity, fairness and competitiveness. These trade-offs require careful consideration.
How is this book relevant during the current COVID-19 crisis?
This book does not deal with pandemic situations. However, it does present research on alternative ways of managing organisations and, relatedly, tackling serious and difficult challenges. This book does suggest that there is a cooperative advantage to addressing such challenges as compared to investor-owned or state-owned and highly bureaucratic organisations where workers and consumers and other effective individuals and communities have little or no voice. From this perspective one would expect that cooperatives should have done a better job in tackling the COVID-19 crisis in terms of effectively implementing solutions. But this would only be the case if coop members and leaders had the correct scientific information in hand and had the means to implement and enforce solutions such as the wearing of masks, sanitising oneself and meeting places (place of work, restaurants, etc.), and enforcing social distancing. Cooperative members have an incentive to protect themselves and their communities. But the state still needs to play a supportive and facilitating role.
Where do you see opportunities for cooperatives during these times?
Basically, what I’ve already discussed, but one example would be cooperative aged-care facilities. A very large percentage of COVID-19 related deaths took place in these facilities. I would suggest that coops could have done a much better job with appropriate and well-understood scientific information. We need to research this important area. But I would suggest that had aged-care facilities been run as a coop with patients, their families and their care-givers running the show, COVID-19 deaths might have been much lesser than they currently are. We could have saved, possibly, tens of thousands of lives. Currently over 300,000 people have died from this virus.
