100 years of RECMA, the international journal of the social economy

RECMA, (1) or the Revue internationale de l’économie sociale (International Journal of the Social Economy), was founded in 1921 by Charles Gide (1847–1932) and Bernard Lavergne (1884–1975) under the original title REC, or Revue des études coopératives (Journal of Cooperative Studies). This year, it is celebrating its 100th anniversary. To mark the occasion, it has partnered with the International Co-operative Alliance’s European research committee to organize an international conference on July 7–9, 2021. This English-language special issue includes articles already published in French in one of the regular issues. It is divided into four sections: Cooperatives, mutuals, and associations on the move; The social economy in history; Associations and solidarities in  Algeriaand Tunisia; and From the association to the SSE enterprise. The third and fourth sections are taken from recently published special reports. This issue demonstrates RECMA’s commitment to working across  disciplines and borders to study and better understand a specific field of practice: the social economy, understood here as all citizen groups that practice some form of economic democracy.

A century-long publishing adventure
The journal is managed by an association (also called RECMA) that was created and is run by major players from the cooperative movement and the French social economy. RECMA publishes four issues per year, available both in print and online. It is distributed  in fifty countries. The managing association organizes quarterly seminars on recently published articles and awards an annual prize for work done by young researchers. RECMA has established partnerships with several other organizations, such as the ADDES and the RIUESS, and it also occasionally collaborates with the CIRIEC and the ACI. You can access the complete archive of RECMA issues from 1921 to 2021 either by visiting the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (https://gallica.bnf.fr) for issues published between 1921 and 2000, or by visiting Cairn.info (or Erudit) for issues published between 1990 and the present day (www.cairn.info/revue-recma.htm).

A meeting place for researchers and practitioners
As an international journal, the field covered by RECMA knows no geographical boundaries. Each issue includes one or several articles on different countries, or that discuss international issues.  RECMA is open to “researcher-practitioners.” Alongside work by academics, RECMA also publishes articles by practitioners. These provide a different view on the social and solidarity economy, based on unique experiential knowledge. (2) Because academic  researchers and researcher-practitioners have played a joint role in the development and writing of the journal, RECMA acts as a kind of meeting place. This is best seen in the RECMA Dialogues, panel discussions organized with authors following the publication of each issue. RECMA is interested not only in reflective work, but also in research that is prospective or projective. Projective techniques are not incompatible with scientific research, which is too often limited to reflective work only. As an “imaginary conception of an  act situated in the future,” projection would appear to be a “particular form of reflective consciousness.” (3) RECMA regularly publishes issues that include special reports. These reports may focus on academic objects—such as the SSE enterprise—or geographical areas—such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, or the Maghreb.
Issue no. 363, which will be published in October, will be largely dedicated to West Africa. Issue no. 362, which will come out this summer (July 2021), is a special issue dedicated to the history of RECMA to celebrate its 100th anniversary. It includes republications of important articles from the “cooperative century” selected by members of the editorial board. We hope you will enjoy it. Information about other events (conferences, seminars) being held to mark RECMA’s 100th anniversary can be found here.
Its spirit of openness and its century of history are what set RECMA apart. By publishing articles from disciplines across the humanities, written by both researchers and practitioners, focusing on theory or on action, adopting a reflective or projective perspective, and investigating issues that affect every continent, RECMA invites its readers to juxtapose scientific knowledge and action and to question the supposed neutrality of both research and social engagement. It gives those working to build the social and solidarity economy the means to renew their political vocation: “The ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not contradictory. Rather, they complement each other and together form the authentic individual, that is to say, the individual who can claim to have a ‘political vocation.’” (4)

We hope you enjoy this special issue!

Jean-François Draperi
Editor-in-Chief

(1) Acronym for Revue des études coopératives, mutualistes et associatives.
(2) The work of Henri Desroche, for example.
(3) François-André Isambert, “Alfred Schütz entre Weber et Husserl,” Revue française de sociologie 30, no. 2 (1989): 299–319, here p. 304.
(4) Max Weber, Le savant et le politique (Paris: Plon, 1959), 183.