Abstract

During the last twenty years many traditionally organized agricultural cooperatives have been forced to abandon their business form. Explanations have been put forward, comprising a variety of economic and sociological theories. The present study suggests that the social capital paradigm may add explanatory power when analyzing this development. It is claimed that the problems are due to the members having increasingly little trust in the cooperatives and in each other. The cooperatives' decision-makers have no instruments for estimating how much social capital is lost when they pursue strategies of vertical and horizontal integration. Therefore they do not consider this loss in their calculations. Thus the problems caused by the cooperatives' vaguely defined property rights are becoming increasingly serious. This reasoning is summarized into a model, which is influenced by the consumer choice model.

Keywords

Social capital, cooperative, agriculture

Published in

Agribusiness
2012, Volume: 28, number: 2, pages: 187-204

SLU Authors

• Nilsson, Jerker

  • Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Business Administration


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/agr.21285

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/39734