Case study: The Daily Bread Co-operative
Sawtell’s article provides a valuable glimpse into the faith-based management techniques that have developed in a modern and successful co-operative, which are described here in some detail. They provide practical examples that could be used by other faith groups seeking to implement new practices.
The Daily Bread Co-operative was founded in Northampton in 1980 by a group of people attached to a local church. It began by preparing, packaging and retailing a range of wholefoods. By 1999, the date of Sawtell’s authorship, it had 20 employees and sales approaching £1m, with no loans and a healthy balance sheet. The working members must be Christians of any denomination, intended as a ‘Monday church’. Every day starts with a half hour meeting for worship, Bible study and prayer, led by members according to a rota.
This is an integral part of the day’s work and follows the Benedictine tradition that the prayer is the ‘work of the community’, just as much as the production of food or hospitality to visitors. (p. 63)
It employs people recovering from mental illness, some of whom move on and some of whom stay. It has donated more than £100,000 in charity to the developing world over the 19 years to date. Salaries are modest and are all the same, with allowances for dependents such as children. The management structure is a hybrid: there is a manager who can make critical buying decisions alone, but decisions affecting people are referred to a weekly meeting. Sawtell reveals a certain degree of inflexibility in the co-operative’s management when he writes: “The constitutional rules are on a single sheet of paper and have not been altered in any way since 1976” (p. 65). Such rigidity is perhaps one way to preserve the ethos against outside influences, which have proved terminal to the faith-based culture of so many businesses considered in this research. Because the co-operative’s rules insist that all employee-owners meet together in one room, that limits them to around 20 people. Sawtell describes the company as a single-tier structure, albeit without reference to the manager’s autonomy in some commercial decisions mentioned above. It is interesting to note that these rules effectively preclude any substantial growth, given that all employee-owners are members of the single tier. The author adds that he does not believe in setting up subsidiaries as that implies a hierarchy, and claims that larger co-operatives struggle with committees and complex means of employee representation, which means there is no obvious structure yet emerging for larger co-operatives. This makes it hard to determine how such an operation could ever become one of the large-scale businesses Sawtell foresees in his aspirations for co-operatives the 21st century.