How nonprofit and economy can co-exist: A cooperative perspective*

Challenging the economic neo-classical discourse that links the accumulation of profit to its distribution, implies disentangling the two notions and admitting the possibility, for an organization, to distribute surpluses while maintaining its nonprofit character. Likewise, it implies belying the alleged incompatibility between the notion of nonprofit and economic entrepreneurship. This suggests that the notions of nonprofitness and economic entrepreneurship can co-exist. It is argued that asserting the nonprofitness of cooperatives and related social economy organisations, might help to distinguish between nonprofits that develop in the context of the economic maistream without challenging it, on the one hand, and nonprofits that question the economic mainstream as a fait accompli and aim to achieve an alternative to it, on the other hand. * Paper presented at the ICA XXI International Cooperative Research Conference, Cork, Ireland, August 2005.