The Contribution of Italian Cooperative Enterprises to Education, Training and Training Processes: an Overview

This paper investigates the role of Italian cooperative enterprises in educational and training processes, aiming to fill a gap in the scientific literature and make visible a widespread but often marginalised heritage. The investigation is based on an exploratory-descriptive approach that integrates a theoretical-argumentative reading with a bibliometric analysis conducted on the Scopus database. Seven contributions to the social, psychological and human sciences were selected and analysed through semantic visualisations obtained with VOSviewer, highlighting the thematic fragmentation, the absence of cohesive theoretical clusters and the weakness of a shared pedagogical lexicon. In parallel, a structural analysis was conducted on cooperative enterprises operating in the education sector, through the extraction of 2,770 units active in the period 2014–2023, recorded in a Moody’s Analytics database. Integrating scientific sources and empirical data allows us to outline a complex picture of the cooperative contribution to education, highlighting transformative potential and epistemic and institutional criticalities. The results call for greater academic and political attention towards cooperative educational practices, understood as inclusive and generative devices, capable of promoting social cohesion, active citizenship and educational justice in the territories.