Mutual Organizations Research Articles

Mediating ethnic conflict at the grassroots: the role of local associational life in shaping political values in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana

This article attempts to understand why ethnic-regional civil war has challenged the national unity of Côte d'Ivoire and not Ghana, two neighbouring countries with nearly identical ethnic, religious and regional divisions, by examining politics at the grassroots. Based on a carefully controlled comparison of two similar regions of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, the study investigates how participation in local voluntary associations reinforces the local experience of the state to shape the ongoing development of political values and affect the prospects for ethnic peace and democracy. The article finds that participation in ethnically heterogeneous voluntary associations does not necessarily promote democratic values and practice. In fact, in Côte d'Ivoire, participation in ethnically heterogeneous cocoa producer and mutual assistance organisations reinforces vertical patronage networks based on narrower ethnic identities. In contrast, in Ghana, participation in more ethnically homogeneous local church groups encourages the development of democratic values and practices at the local level that mediate the potential for ethnic conflict and support the consolidation of a democratic regime.

The Governance of cooperatives and mutual associations: a paradox perspective

Abstract This paper presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the governance of co‐operative and mutual organisations. The theoretical literature on the governance of co‐operatives is relatively undeveloped in comparison with that on corporate governance. The paper briefly reviews some of the main theoretical perspectives on corporate governance and discusses how they can be usefully extended to throw light on the governance of co‐operatives and mutuals. However, taken individually these different theories are rather one dimensional, only illuminating a particular aspect of the board's role. This has lead to calls for a new conceptual framework that can help integrate the insights of these different theories. The paper argues that a paradox perspective offers a promising way forward. Contrasting the different theoretical perspectives highlights some of the important paradoxes, ambiguities and tensions that boards face.

Informal social support interventions and their role in violence prevention: an agenda for future evaluation.

There is increasing interest among policymakers and practitioners in tapping the potential of family, friends, volunteers, peer support groups, and mutual aid organizations to help prevent violence. The popularity of these informal social support (ISS) interventions stems, in part, from their flexibility, responsiveness to individual needs, and perceived low cost. However, there is still limited understanding of whether and how ISS interventions can improve social support, reduce violence, or save money. Furthermore, mobilizing and sustaining ISS interventions appears to be difficult, particularly for families living in high-risk environments. Rigorous and creative evaluations of ISS interventions are needed to inform policy decisions and refine program development and implementation. Focusing on the field of child maltreatment, we describe different kinds of ISS interventions and outline an evaluation agenda that includes core research questions and evaluation challenges and strategies.

A Sociohistorical View of Addiction and Alcoholism

This essay is framed by the work of Edward Sampson (1993), and is a sociohistorical analysis of the institutional vicissitudes in American history that have formed the ground of our current version of the “truth” about drugs, alcohol, the drug addict and the alcoholic. The drug and alcohol discourse has been used throughout American history to institute and maintain normative ideals. These ideals are contoured by Western individualistic understandings of human being. They revolve around a theme of freedom seen as access to unlimited possibilities, which arises as a right for those individuals who are self-reliant. Alcoholics and addicts have been used as political identities, silently portraying the opposite and living out the underside of these normative ideals. As political identities they are used discursively to maintain mainstream illusions of self-reliance and to hide the falsehood of the capitalist promise of unfettered access to unlimited possibilities. Capitalist interests flourish through the maintenance of these illusions, and are able to disown responsibility via the silencing, through embodiment, of those who have been marginalized. This self-celebratory discourse is, hence, a monologue that undermines the possibility of hierarchical revolutions. Encapsulated in the embodiment of the alcoholic and addict are the covering over of political conflicts, the leveling down of difference, and the marginalizing of those who represent dialogical possibility. Twelve-step mutual help organizations participate in self-celebratory monologues that maintain the version of truth supportive of the agendas of the wealthy; however, they also offer an other-centered strategy by which dialogue again becomes possible.

Do Community-based Health Insurance Schemes Improve Poor People’s Access to Health Care? Evidence From Rural Senegal

Community-based health insurance is an emerging and promising concept, which addresses health care challenges faced in particular by the rural poor. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether rural Senegal members of a health insurance scheme are actually better-off than nonmembers. The results show that in poor environments, insurance programs can work: Members of les mutuelles de sant e ́ (mutual health organizations) have a higher probability of using hospitalization services than nonmembers and pay substantially less when they need care. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that while the schemes achieved to attract poor people, the poorest of the poor remained excluded.

The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928

The lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent has been largely over-looked by historians of American mob violence. This essay offers the first attempt to construct a systematic set of data on the subject. The authors contend that between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched at least 597 Mexicans. Traditional interpretations of western violence cannot account for this phenomenon. The actual causes of mob violence against Mexicans were several-fold: race and the legacy of Anglo American expansion, economic competition, and diplomatic tensions between Mexico and the United States. Throughout this era, Mexicans formulated numerous means of resistance against Anglo mobs. These included armed self-defense, public protest, the establishment of mutual defense organizations, and appeals for aid to the Mexican government. The central aim of this essay is to broaden the scholarly discourse on lynching by moving beyond the traditional limitations of the black/white paradigm. Placing the experience of Mexicans into the history of lynching expands our understanding of the causes of mob violence and the ways in which individuals and groups sought to resist lynching and vigilantism. The essay is based on numerous archival sources in both Spanish and English. These include diaries, letters, memoirs, folk culture, newspapers, government documents, and diplomatic correspondence.

Systems for planning and delivering services for Alcohol‐related problems: System‐level thinking much needed. Comment on Chapter 12: Treatment and early intervention services

Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity's goal of policy relevance leads naturally and appropriately to a discussion of system-level issues in treatment and early intervention (Chapter 12 of Babor et al. 2003). Defining what constitutes a ‘system’ has proved elusive, and many countries’‘alcohol treatment systems’ are systems only in name (Klingemann et al. 1992). Babor et al. (2003) grapple with two aspects of the system question, namely what principles should guide (a) how we identify, understand and prioritize need for intervention in the population, and (b) how we organize available intervention services. Babor et al. (2003) do an admirable job of proposing a system for defining population need for services, which is one of the toughest challenges in public health planning (Andrews & Henderson 2000). The six conditions for a population approach (Box 12.1) surmount the usual problem of equating diagnostic prevalence with treatment need. As the authors are clearly aware, not all diagnosed cases want treatment, not all would benefit if they received it and many others will remit without it. A further excellent aspect of the authors’‘conditions for a population approach for alcohol-related problems’ is its attention to the economic benefits of treatment. To provide treatment solely on compassionate grounds is laudable, but we must recognize a political reality: there will probably always be a limit on how sympathetic the average citizen will feel towards someone who has a problem with alcohol or other drugs. For this reason, any politically viable population approach must establish the benefits of treatment not just to patients, but also to the broader society who will be asked to devote public resources to it. Chapter 12 could have gone further in proposing a system to organize the interventions it describes so ably. The ‘stepped care’ system seems promising in this regard (Sobell & Sobell 1999). Under this model, alcohol-related mutual help organizations could constitute the first line of defense for help-seekers because they do help many individuals, are easy to access and cause minimal intrusion into the individual's life (Humphreys 2004). Policy makers might be particularly interested to learn that several countries have implemented policies that strengthen self-help groups without co-opting them, and that such efforts probably more than pay for themselves through reductions in health-care costs (Humphreys 2004). Those people with alcohol problems who are uninterested in, or not helped by, mutual help groups would become candidates for a brief intervention in a stepped-care treatment system. The authors note correctly that brief interventions cause mean reductions in alcohol consumption in non-dependent problem drinking samples. However, such mean changes prove neither that every non-dependent problem drinker benefits from brief interventions nor that no alcohol-dependent individuals benefit. To set an a priori decision rule based on diagnosis may be less wise than simply giving brief interventions to everyone and then defining the severe cases as those who do not benefit. Many treatment decisions in other areas of medicine are made in a pragmatic fashion in which low-level interventions are used for both treatment and assessment of whether more intensive services are needed. This seems to me a more promising approach for organizing an alcohol treatment system than is the continued pursuit of a priori rules for assigning patients to one type of psychotherapy or another (the ability of the psychotherapy matching hypothesis to keep walking around, post-Project MATCH, with so many empirical stakes in its heart would put Count Dracula to shame). In a stepped-care treatment system, actual data on how each patient responds or fails to respond to lower intensity intervention are used to assign them to the next level of care (e.g. out-patient, residential, telephone follow-ups). I would close with a final comment about systems for planning and organizing alcohol-related services. I share the authors’ belief that science can and must inform policy; but I am sure they would agree with me that empirical comparison of systems is very difficult. For example, conducting the Fort Bragg evaluation of two alternative systems for organizing mental health care cost nearly US$100 million in today's terms (Bickman et al. 1995). As scientists, we can often only test parts of our proposed systems, leaving us always in need of compelling conceptual models in which to arrange our results into coherent policy proposals. Babor et al. (2003) offer an excellent model for assessing and responding to population need, which along with other work in the field on organizing treatment systems (e.g. Sobell & Sobell 1999) should raise the policy relevance of alcohol research. I thank John Finney for comments on these ideas and the US Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Service and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for grant support.

Gamblers Anonymous: A critical review of the literature

This study surveys existing literature on Gamblers Anonymous (GA) and issues that help to contextualise our understanding of this mutual aid association. While GA has been the subject of investigation by social scientists, it is still understudied, with a notable shortage of research on issues facing women and ethnic minorities. A need exists for large-scale assessments of GA's effectiveness, more detailed accounts of GA beliefs and practices, increased knowledge of the ways in which GA attendance interacts with both formal treatment and attendance at other mutual aid organisations, and a better understanding of the profiles of gamblers best (and least) suited to GA, along with a clearer grasp of what GA was able to offer those gamblers that it seems to have helped. This assessment of the current state of knowledge underscores the embryonic state of our collective inquiry into the nature of GA, and the authors emphasise that significant advances have been made. Notably, important targets for study are being identified.

Alternative Explanations for Changes in Ownership Structure

The governance of the public limited company has been a continuing and mainstream interest of economists since Berle and Means [1932/1967] made the 'division of ownership from control' the central feature of their investigation into US-style capitalism. This concentration on the investor-owned public limited company, however, diverts attention from alternative forms of governance which have featured prominently in the past, at least in certain industries. As HANSMANN [1996] shows convincingly, organisations such as consumer and supply co-operatives, mutual organisations, non-profit enterprises and even workers' co-operatives have represented a significant part of the organisational landscape in the United States. Very similar observations can be made of the history of corporate enterprise in the UK (Ricketts [1999]). Changes in the ownership structure of companies have often accompanied economic development. These changes may be economy wide, as in the gradual substitution of the public limited company for the unlimited partnership or private company during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Changes may take place in particular industries or sectors as in the recent trend away from mutual governance in parts of the financial services sector in the UK. PENCAVEL [2001] studies the rise of worker co-operatives in the plywood industry in the Pacific Northwest of the United States after the First World War, and their subsequent decline after the 1950s as the main centres of production moved elsewhere. Competition between governance arrangements does not occur entirely through the processes of new firm formation and bankruptcy, however, but also through changes to the governance structures of individual firms. Scottish Mutual, a Life Insurance Company in the UK, for example, was established as a proprietary company in 1883. It became a mutual company in 1952 by Private Act of Parliament, but then demutualised in 1991 and was acquired by Abbey National (itself a recently demutualised Building Society)1 . In some periods

Demutualization and Corporate Governance of Stock Exchanges

Securities exchanges all over the world are demutualizing and converting from non-profit mutual organizations to for-profit, investor owned corporations. Several exchanges have become publicly traded companies and are listed on the exchange itself. The dramatic changes in the organizational form of the exchanges reflect major changes in their business environment caused by intense global competition and advances in technology. Some of the traditional sources of revenue, such as listing fees, membership fees, and sale of information services and market data are becoming less important. Transactions fee will continue to be one of the most important sources of revenue and exchanges that can attract liquidity will succeed. Exchanges are adding new products and services to expand their revenue base. Typically, exchanges have operated as self-regulatory organizations and the new organizational structure has raised a number of regulatory issues. There are concerns about the inherent conflict of interest between the business operations and the regulatory obligations. However, demutualized exchanges argue that enforcing a good regulatory framework is critical to an exchange's commercial success.

LETS in a cold climate: Green Dollars, self-help and neoliberal welfare in New Zealand

English Complementary currencies have emerged as social policy tools in a number of countries in the last 15 years. This article examines the performance of Green Dollar Exchanges in New Zealand/Aotearoa in a neoliberal environment where fiscal ‘imperatives’ led to state provision of welfare being curtailed in favour of delivery by organisations within civil society through self-help. It argues that, while self-help does have a place within overall welfare provision, voluntary mechanisms failed to fill the gap left by state withdrawal. Consequently, an over-optimistic perspective of the contribution of mutual aid organisations in meeting welfare needs as an alternative to, rather than complementary to, state provision is problematic.

Perceived Benefits and Costs and Members' Attendance in a Mutual Aid Organisation for People with Mild Mental Health Problems

This paper reports two studies that assessed the bearing of perceived benefits and costs on members' attendance in a mutual aid organisation for people with mild mental health problems. The bimotivational framework of costs and benefits was followed. Fifty-one members of a mutual aid organisation participated in the first study. It was found that members' attendance in programmes (but not group meetings) was associated with perceived costs but not benefits of participation. The second study used open-ended questions to explore the reasons why members failed to attend programmes. The results provided additional support for the relevance of perceived costs such as inconvenience or other commitments. The findings were discussed in consideration of the mutual aid organisations as communal relationships. Implications for theory, research, and application are discussed.

Penny banks in Glasgow, 18501914

This paper explores the extent and nature of ‘Penny bank’ saving in Glasgow during the second half of the nineteenth century. Penny banks existed as part of the network of philanthropic organisations in the quintessential industrial city, and they were frequented by the poorer sections of the working class – those for whom saving represented a difficult and occasionally sacrificial effort. They were a voluntary and individualist decision to engage in saving, in contrast to the mutual organisations, such as friendly and industrial welfare societies which also proliferated in this period. The enormous success of penny banks in Glasgow, and throughout the United Kingdom, is powerful evidence that a great deal of saving was happening, even amongst the poorest sections of society. Careful examination of the activities of two penny banks suggests that they operated both as short-term liquidity stores and as vehicles for longer-term and larger-amount savings.

Building Society Demutualisation in the UK

In the mid-1990s several building societies in the UK ceased to be mutual organisations and became public limited companies (plcs). This paper seeks to explain this change, which has ended the building societies' historic dominance of the mortgage market. The thesis that mutuality had become redundant as an ownership form is rejected. Structural changes in the industry have presented mortgage lenders with strategic choices, rather than dictated a single viable course. Structural change necessitated demutualisation only in the limited cases where a larger plc took over a small mutual. Case studies of each of the building societies that have converted indicated four other principal reasons for demutualisation: (1) an attempt to maintain full organisational independence; (2) an attempt to maintain operational independence; (3) a growth by acquisition strategy; and (4) a members' revolt. Along with the continued commitment to mutuality of some societies, these represent a variety of responses to structural change.

Turning Seats Into Shares: Implications of Demutualization for the Regulation of Stock Exchanges

A dramatic shift in the economic and power structure of the securities industry is currently in progress. Although competition to traditional markets from electronic trading markets may be the precipitating cause of this upheaval, more than technology is driving these changes. The worldwide rise in stock exchange trading volume, global integration of the capital markets and competition for trading profits are leading to disintermediation at a rate that the securities markets have not experienced since the unfixing of commission rates. Looming on the horizon is decimalization which will further cut the conventional trading increment to a penny or less. Another important development is the ongoing demutualization of the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc. (NASD) and the future demutualization of the New York Stock Exchange, Inc. (NYSE). Traditionally, stock exchanges have operated in the form of non-profit mutual or membership organizations. To the extent market power was not curtailed by competition or regulation, mutual governance gave specialist or market maker members of an exchange control of the price, quality and range of services produced by the exchange. Exchange profits were returned to broker and dealer members in the form of lower access fees or trading profits. Further, exchanges have long operated as self-regulatory organizations (SROs) with members contributing their time to governance and self-regulation to make exchanges more effective and more profitable. Self-regulation was enshrined in the federal securities laws with oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In addition, in 1975 the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Exchange Act) was amended to impose certain corporate governance structures on exchanges. The pressure to reduce trading execution costs, the demands for technological innovation and demutualization are raising many market structure issues. These include regulation of electronic communication networks; market fragmentation; linkages; market information fees and other exchange revenues; the fair treatment of customer orders; and perhaps most importantly, the future of self-regulation. New competitive strategies by exchanges and their members, including demutualization, are raising conflicts of interest questions about self-regulation that the SEC has only begun to address. This article will argue that the SEC is attempting to re-regulate market structure under a command and control model pursuant to the national market system provisions injected into the Exchange Act in 1975 at a time when the monopoly trading regime which led to the national market system mandate is breaking down. Further, this model is probably doomed to fail unless the securities industry endorses the SEC's market structure initiatives. An interesting and relevant question this article will pose is whether current trading technologies and the competition these technologies have engendered should lead to a reduction of SEC market regulation, rather than the increase in regulation envisioned by current SEC concept and rulemaking releases, so that competition rather than regulation can determine outcomes. This article will also inquire about the future of self-regulation and stock exchange governance in a world where stock exchanges are not mutual organizations. As a general matter, judging from developments in other countries, demutualization may lead to a transfer of regulation from exchanges to government regulators. A countervailing trend could be that national regulators will be unable to engage in as effective regulation of trading markets in a trading environment that moves across boundaries with the click of a mouse. Therefore, self-regulation will be required to assure that global markets are fair and honest.

Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900

Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900. By Stephen A. Vincent. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 244. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) Stephen A. Vincent has helped to close the gap in the historiography of African-American migration to the Midwest. His new book, Southern Seed, Northern Soil, describes in great detail, the migration of African-American farm families from Northampton, Greensville, and Halifax counties, North Carolina to Indiana. Vincent's work focuses upon the Beech and Roberts families, whose free status and land ownership can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. Although both families were able to amass a substantial amount of property, circumstance and the quality of life began to change drastically for many free blacks in early nineteenth-century North Carolina. As rebellion swept across Santo Domingo, heightened levels of fear and insecurity initiated the tightening of slave codes in the South. The rigidity of the atmosphere in nineteenth-century North Carolina simultaneously restricted the rights and privileges of free blacks. With a scarcity of open land to purchase, the future of black farmers in North Carolina did not look promising. By the end of the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy and the Nat Turner rebellion prompted the intensely hostile treatment of free blacks, which in turn made migration to the Midwest much more attractive. By the 1840s, the Beech settlement in Ripley township and the Roberts settlement in Jackson and Adams townships began to function as selfsufficient and semi-autonomous free black communities. In close proximity to Quaker settlers, both settlements were able to purchase a substantial amount of land and eventually to build their own churches, schools, and mutual aid organizations. However, the decades following the Civil War proved to be extremely difficult for the African-American settlers. High land prices, industrialization, and technology virtually destroyed the Beech and Roberts settlements, facilitating black migration to urban cities such as Cincinnati and Chicago. Vincent's meticulous account of these settlers provides the reader with a clear idea of difficulties of life on the frontier. Helpful maps and charts, along with a sharp depiction of agrarian life on the frontier, add clarity to the Roberts-Beech journey from North Carolina to Indiana. At times, however, the narrative is a bit redundant, in particular as it recounts the relationship between Quaker and African-American communities in Indiana. …

Counting on Each Other: A Social Audit Model to Assess the Impact of Nonprofit Organizations

Betty Jane “B. J.” Richmond Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto The purpose of this study is to shed light on the social and economic impact of nonprofit organizations on their communities. The literature on nonprofit organizations in Canada and the United States offers few frameworks from which to study nonprofits’ social-economic role or their value. This study examines nonprofit organizations as part of a social economy that also includes cooperatives and mutual benefit organizations. The social economy perspective promotes an emphasis on the social and economic functions of organizations with a social purpose. Exploring the current separation of market and social value, as well as alternative theories of value, this study develops a model of how nonprofits produce social capital. A labor theory of value is adapted to explain how nonprofits create surplus value. As well as a theoretical model, the study develops a practical social audit model for assessing a nonprofit organization’s participation in the social economy of its community. The model combines a financial audit approach with other evaluation techniques and is designed for use in all three economic sectors. Identifying the social and economic resources that enter the organization in an audit year and those that return to the community, the model puts forward methods for assessing an organization’s outcomes. It then attributes a comparative economic value to them. The social audit model is tested on a community-based employment-training agency serving persons with disabilities and other severe barriers to employment. The findings demonstrate that the agency’s social return-onNonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, December 2000 594-595 © 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

The Demutualisation of AMP Society: An Example of the Valuation of Collars Comprising Asian Options

A number of Australian mutual organisations have recently been demutualised and restructured as public companies. In the case of AMP Society, a cottar comprising average price, or Asian, options formed part of the financial structuring of the demutualisation process. We value the collar and demonstrate that decisions made by policyholders during the demutualisation process are likely to have been affected by their level of uncertainty with respect to the value of AMP shares. This finding has implications as to the quantity of information provided to policyholders during the demutualisation process.

Parent mutual aid organizations in child welfare demonstration project: A report of outcomes

This paper reports the outcomes of a mutual aid intervention designed to help child welfare agencies to take advantage of the benefits of informal ways of helping their clientele. The PMAO program model is based on acknowledging the multiple difficulties confronting most families using child welfare services, the characteristics of formal family support programs that seem to be effective with these populations, and social science explanations about the relevance of informal support to coping with stress and maintaining psychological well-being. Data were collected from PMAO and comparison samples over a three year period to assess changes in out-of-home child placement, independence from formal service providers, integration in the community, levels of perceived social support, self-esteem, perceived stress, parental attitudes and cost savings. On all of these measures, the study revealed that PMAO members showed positive gains over the evaluation time period that were not apparent for the comparison group members receiving regular child welfare services. These findings suggest that there is merit in including mutual aid strategies as an integral part of the repertoire for helping families in child welfare.

Defining the Nonprofit Sector: Some Lessons from History

This article seeks to establish whether the structural-operational definition of the sector, used by the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (JHCNSP), is universal in its applicability. Historical case studies of primary health care and social housing provision in nineteenth-century England demonstrate that the definition cannot accommodate the institutional diversity of earlier periods and does not produce meaningful sectoral distinctions. The structural-operational definition rules out of the sector a significant proportion of nonstatutory, nonprofit maximizing providers. In particular, it excludes the mutual aid organizations, which are widely recognized as important for the development of civil society and which have historically been considered to be key components of the sector. These case studies suggest that the structural-operational definition limits the capacity of the JHCNSP to fulfil its aim of establishing “the factors that promote or retard the sector's development” owing to potential measurement errors and the pattern of development that the project implicitly assumes for the nonprofit sector.