Institutional adaptation in the evolution of the ‘co-operative principles’

The ‘co-operative principles’ are a set of operating and aspirational guidelines for co-operative businesses that originated in England in the 1840s and are used worldwide today. We evaluate alternative explanations for their emergence and spread. One hypothesis is that the co-operative principles constitute institutional adaptations helping co-operatives survive and spread. Alternatively, the principles might be adaptively neutral but spread fad-like between co-operatives, or they may spread even while hampering co-operative survival, constituting a maladaptation. We use established empirical rubrics to identify the preconditions and signatures of adaptive evolution in the co-operative principles in their 170-year historical record. Historical analysis provides compelling evidence of the variation, transmission and selection of the co-operative principles in various periods and environments. We document that the principles arose and have been modified via intentional innovation, that they sometimes work to facilitate cooperation among the members of a co-operative, and that in some cases they have spread due to their beneficial effects on the co-operatives which adopt them. We also report macro-evolutionary patterns which suggest adaptive evolution may have occurred, including patterns of descent with modification and the adaptive radiation of the principles into worker co-operatives. The patchwork evidence is consistent with a mix of evolutionary processes varying over time, and some principles may have been selected against. We conclude that the co-operative principles likely constituted institutional adaptations as a whole in 1840s England and 1950s Spain but may have only been adaptive in a piecemeal fashion otherwise. We conclude by proposing that the co-operative principles can be revised and improved scientifically.