New understandings of co-operatives are vital in a changing world, not least of all because
new understandings are opportunities to include new people and new groups in the project
of Co-operative Studies. In this essay I offer some loosely connected thoughts about how
co-operative studies might be enriched by perspectives and ideas drawn from the area of
cultural studies, which I take to include studies of communications, postmodernism,
postcolonialism, feminism, and other related fields. This is, of course, not the only source
for new ideas about co-operatives; but it is an important source, precisely because cultural
studies are active today and transgress the boundaries of many disciplines. A colleague
remarked to me after hearing a version of this paper that it is striking how absent cultural studies
practitioners are from the field of co-operative studies, and how important it is that
they be drawn in.

I do not aim to offer a survey of cultural studies and its elements; I am not qualified to do
so. But in any case, I believe what is most important is to show how ideas from cultural
studies can be woven into our academic studies of co-operatives — to show how selective
ideas and insights can illuminate questions that already concern us, as theoreticians and
practitioners of co-operatives: as well as raise new questions we might hardly have
considered before. I believe, personally, that academic understandings of co-operatives are
stale and could use some shaking up. Our words and categories for talking about cooperatives
often conceal as much as they explain.

It may sound strange to say this when I am talking about something as esoteric as
postmodernism, but I am very interested in co-operative practice — practical experience
wedded with theoretical understanding, or “praxis” — and with empirical approaches to cooperative
studies. I see cultural studies as a way towards praxis, experience, and
empiricism because of its concern with language and the ideas embedded in language.
Practitioners use language; concepts are critical to leaders and followers; culture is
fundamental to organizations. Words (and the ideas behind them) are the most important
tools for people who do things in the real world. Nothing is more practical.
In saying this, I have gone far beyond what I can accomplish in this essay. I aim in the
following pages to sketch some hints and suggestive openings that I, personally, find
valuable as indications of where we could go with experientially grounded, cultural and
linguistic studies of co-operatives. My specific interest has to do with the “betweenness”
of co-operatives, the ways in which they sit on the threshold (the limen, Latin) between

categories, communities, and identities.