Theresia Theurl ist Professorin für Volkswirtschaftslehre und leitet das Institut für Genossenschaftswesen der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Ihre Schwerpunkte in Forschung, Lehre und Praxistransfer sind Governance, Regulierung und Management aller Formen von Unternehmenskooperationen sowie wirtschaftspolitische und institutionenökonomische Fragen. Sie ist Vorsitzende des Wirtschaftspolitischen Ausschusses sowie des Ausschusses für Wirtschaftssysteme und Institutionenökonomik des Vereins für Socialpolitik.

Networks, alliances, joint ventures, cooperatives - there is a multitude of cooperative business models and the number of enterprises that rely on cooperation or consider them as a future option is rapidly rising. Therefore, the boundaries of the firm become increasingly blurred and discerning becomes more difficult. Innovations in information and communication technology allow for a more complex design of the interfaces to other enterprises and consequently, structures evolve that are no longer clear-cut enterprises but interwoven networks of enterprises. Evidently, such networks and cooperative structures require new management techniques enabling the corporations to actively design and operate cooperations for the benefit of their companies.
These considerations have been the starting point for the "International Cooperatives Forum 2004" that has been organised by the Institute for cooperative research of the University of Muenster. The contributions to this volume are the collected English language papers that have been reported and discussed in the work shop sessions of the conference. They elaborate new ways of managing cooperations, analyse the pecularities of cooperatives in different countries, and present the future options and risks of cooperations. The German language papers are published in a separate volume.