Objectives’ alignment between members and agricultural cooperatives

Francois Bareille, Florence Bonnet-Beaugrand and Sabine Duvaleix

No 17-02, Working Papers SMART from INRAE UMR SMART

Abstract: Members’ commitment lessens when agricultural cooperatives grow larger. Their organization becomes more complex and their membership more heterogeneous, which threatens their sustainability and leads them to implement specific mechanisms for collective decisions. We explore how the alignment of objectives between a multi-purpose cooperative and its members influences member commitment. We estimate a multinomial probit model on a cross-section sample of 3,205 members from a large agricultural cooperative in France. We assess the determinants of member commitment through four factors: the offer of new agricultural practices, the availability of outlets and supplies to members, the farm distance to the cooperative headquarters and the farm governance. We show that the adoption of new agricultural practices has a small but significant effect. The availability of outlets and supplies has the strongest effect on the economic involvement of the farmers. Other determinants, such as farm governance or geographical distance to the cooperative headquarters, also reinforce member commitment.

Keywords: agricultural cooperatives; member commitment; farm innovation; economic involvement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 Q13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dcm and nep-hme
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Objectives’alignment between membersand agricultural cooperatives (2017)
Journal Article: Objectives’ alignment between members and agricultural cooperatives (2017)
Working Paper: Objectives’ alignment between members and agricultural cooperatives (2017)
Working Paper: Objectives’ alignment between members and agricultural cooperatives (2016)
Journal Article: Objectives’ alignment between members and agricultural cooperatives
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rae:wpaper:201702

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