During the ICA CCR Europe Research Conference 2026, Shreya Paudel presented her research ‘Representing the Cooperative Movement: The International Cooperative Alliance in the Early 20th Century’, co-authored with Tine De Moor. The research explores the historical development of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) and examines its role in representing, connecting, and strengthening the cooperative movement at an international level.

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Background
How does a transnational meta-organization turn a dispersed and heterogeneous set of bottom-up organizations into a collective that is recognized by actors within and outside the field? Meta-organizations are associations whose members are organizations, rather than individuals (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Berkowitz et al., 2022). As collective actors, they are central in creating a shared, coherent and distinct identity for the collective they represent through activities such as knowledge production, advocacy, diffusion of shared practices (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Berkowitz et al., 2022). Yet, we know relatively little about how meta-organizations represent the collective (Berkowitz et al., 2022; Brankovic, 2018). What does representation look like when the organizational category is not well-established (yet), and members are heterogeneous across countries, sectors, and institutional contexts? How do meta-organizations decide what becomes countable, what categories will be used, and how comparability will be claimed or limited? We address these questions through the historical case of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) and its efforts to define and represent the cooperative movement at the international level.

Empirical Context and Research Questions
Founded in 1895, the ICA functioned as what scholars would later conceptualize as a meta-organization. The ICA was one of the earliest and most durable international organizations of its kind. As a voluntary association, the ICA brought together autonomous national associations that functioned across diverse national contexts while surviving world wars, ideological conflict, and major political upheaval (Hilson, 2018; Rhodes, 1994). That heterogeneity of the cooperative movement is central to the case. By the early twentieth century, cooperation had become a major social and economic phenomenon across Europe and beyond, but it took markedly different forms across countries and sectors. Even in regions frequently treated as coherent, such as northern Europe, the movement was internally differentiated and often politically contested (Hilson, 2018). More generally, cooperation remained open to competing interpretations: it could be framed as a business model, a democratic organizational form, a social movement, a practical instrument of self-help, an alternative to capitalism, or a vehicle of social peace and reform (Hilson, 2018; Rhodes, 1994).

For the ICA, then, representation was never simply a matter of reporting on an already defined and widely understood type of organization. Before it could represent the movement, it had to define the movement in ways that would account for the internal diversity while giving a message of coherence externally. We ask:

RQ. How does a transnational meta-organization construct the representation of a highly diverse cooperative movement?
RQ1. What categories, indicators, and boundary choices are selected to represent the collective, and how do these choices evolve over time?
RQ2. What stated intentions, utilities, and purposes are attached to macro-level overviews, and how are these purposes linked to the representation of the movement as a collective?

Methods
We adopt an interpretive historical approach to answer the central question.Our analysis is centered on archival materials published by the ICA from 1910 to 1949, which include yearbooks,statistical statements, and associated textual apparatus, especially prefaces, editorial introductions, methodological notes, and classificatory explanations. We read these materials not simply for the data they contain as neutral records, but as historically situated organizational artifacts through which a meta-organization attempted to define, order, and stabilize the field it claimed to represent (Bucheli & Wadhwani, 2013; Rowlinson et al., 2014). Using an abductive and iterative analysis, we examine the representational choices made by the ICA, how it pursued comparability across heterogeneous members and over time, and how it managed incompleteness in ways that preserved the possibility of a coherent overview (Sætre & Van De Ven, 2021; Wadhwani, 2023).

Preliminary Results
Preliminary analysis suggests that the ICA’s yearbooks and statistical publications functioned not simply as neutral representation of the cooperative movement, but as organizational devices through which the collective identity was built. The yearbooks reveal how the ICA constructed the cooperative identity as a bounded object through coverage, categories, and aggregation, while repeatedly working on the problem of comparability across the heterogeneous cooperative forms. They also show that incompleteness, delays, and uneven returns were recurring conditions of the representational project itself.

Contributions and Implications
The paper makes two contributions. First, it contributes to meta-organization theory by showing how public reporting practices can act as a central mode of meta-organizational action and representational work. Second, it contributes to broader discussions of collective identity and field formation by showing how a heterogeneous organizational domain becomes publicly intelligible not only through discourse or membership rules, but through recurring classificatory and statistical practices that make a field recognizable and representable in durable form.

Empirically, the ICA case speaks to research on inter-cooperation among cooperatives by showing that the ICA’s transnational coordination involved not only exchange among cooperatives, but also the representational work through which the movement developed the shared identity of a collective.

Key References
Ahrne, G., & Brunsson, N. (2008). Meta-organizations. Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781848442658
Berkowitz, H., Brunsson, N., Grothe-Hammer, M., Sundberg, M., & Valiorgue, B. (2022). Meta-Organizations: A Clarification and a Way Forward. M@n@gement, 25(2), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.37725/mgmt.v25.8728
Brankovic, J. (2018). How Do Meta-organizations Affect Extra-organizational Boundaries? The Case of University Associations. In L. Ringel, P. Hiller, & C. Zietsma (Eds.), Research in the Sociology of Organizations (Vol. 57, pp. 259–281). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20180000057010
Bucheli, M., & Wadhwani, R. D. (Eds.). (2013). Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646890.001.0001
Hilson, M. (2018). The International Co-operative Alliance and the consumer co-operative movement in Northern Europe, c. 1860-1939. Manchester University Press.
Rhodes, R. (1994). International Co-operative Alliance during war and peace, 1910-1950. https://doi.org/10.21954/OU.RO.0000FB6E
Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J., & Decker, S. (2014). Research Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue Between Historical Theory and Organization Theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3), 250–274. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2012.0203
Sætre, A. S., & Van De Ven, A. (2021). Generating Theory by Abduction. Academy of Management Review, 46(4), 684–701. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2019.0233
Wadhwani, R. D. (2023). Critical hermeneutics: Deriving meaning from historical sources. In S. Decker, W. M. Foster, & E. Giovannoni (Eds.), Handbook of Historical Methods for Management (pp. 218–231). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800883741.00024