The End of Cooperative Movement?

The study introduces a sociological study of Finnish consumer cooperation, framed within C. Wright Mills’s concept of the “sociological imagination” — the interplay between capital movements, changing societal structures, and individual agency.

The author’s interest stems both from personal experience as a researcher within the Finnish E cooperative movement and from the broader identity crisis facing consumer cooperatives across the Western world. This crisis reflects pressure to shed historical ties to working-class and peasant movements and to redefine cooperation as a conventional capitalist economic activity.

The study focuses particularly on Finland, where rapid socio-economic modernization since the late 1950s, combined with international integration, has fundamentally transformed the conditions under which the cooperative movement operates.

• ISSN: 0358-5980
• ISBN: 951-9282-60-2