The 'Social' as Metaphor and the Case of Cooperatives by Marie L. Pellegrin-Rescia

Author:Marie L. Pellegrin-Rescia [Pellegrin-Rescia, Marie L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351145220
Google: pTiDDwAAQBAJ
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Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

The traditional community and the cooperative differ as to their patterns of ownership and decision making: common, indivisible and unanimous on the one hand, and individualisable and according to ‘one man, one vote’, on the other (Desroche, 1976, p.313). The cooperative can be seen as a form of individualisation of a particular form of economic endeavour, a sort of business logic transferred to the level of the self-managed group. At the same time, the cooperative remains clearly distinguished from the capitalist enterprise by the fact that members, rather than capital, are the criterion of decision making and distribution of surpluses and by the predominance of undivided reserves over the individual member shares. If so, the difference between the cooperative and the capitalist model is by far greater than that between the cooperative and the community.

Seen from a perspective of sociology of development, the cooperative and the community present two different, yet complementary, social systems. According to the taxonomic approach of Hillery (1968) and Gottschalk (1975) the cooperative, as a voluntary organisation, and the community, as an ‘informal’ one, belong to the high and low goal-oriented types of organisations, respectively. Based on this approach, the cooperative might be expected to lower its high goal orientation to serve the community in its economic and ecological needs and the community, in turn, might be expected to raise its low goal orientation by contributing to the cooperative its good will, legitimisation and material and non- material resources (Levi, 1981). As such the cooperative and the community are complementary systems in a reciprocal interplay (Figure 2).

Figure 2 The Community-Cooperative Interaction

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