Educational and Business Co-Operatives

Abstract

One tendency among co-operatives is to establish co-operatives not only for the purposes of business but also for the purposes to teach collaboration practices in business education. This study investigates and compares traditional business co-operatives and educational co-operatives as the environments of entrepreneurial learning communities. The data, which consist of interviews with members of both types of co-operatives, have been analyzed using the content analysis method. The main outcomes show that in both types of co-operatives sense of community and creativity are manifested as the parts of the entrepreneurial learning process. When considering if the learning processes were manifested as single- and double-loop learning – and the development of collective creativity – some differences were observed between educational co-operatives and business co-operatives.