Interpreting the Roles and Economic Importance of Cooperative Enterprises in a Historical Perspective

Vera Negri Zamagni

Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 2012, vol. 1, issue 1, 21-36

Abstract: Cooperative enterprises have been in existence in all fields of economic activity for around 200 years, but they have tended to bunch in some sectors. This paper will examine which sectors have the most cooperatives at a world level, attempt to sketch out a typology and enquire into the reasons for this bunching. There are essentially four cooperative forms: Users cooperatives, Producers cooperatives,Workers cooperatives, and Social or community cooperatives. While workers cooperatives have received a disproportionate amount of attention from the theoretical literature, I argue that historically this has been the least successful type of cooperative and only recently has seen some revival in the service sector. The role of capital, management styles and intrinsic motivations will be considered to explain this historical evidence. The final section of the paper is devoted to drawing lessons from the historical material analyzed in the paper.

Keywords: cooperative enterprises; worker cooperatives; users cooperatives; instrinsic motivations; historical evidence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J54 L31 N30 N60 N80 P13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://jeodonline.com/jeod_articles/interpreting- ... torical-perspective/ (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:trn:csnjrn:v:1:i:1:p:21-36

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity from European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Barbara Franchini ().