How do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the social performance of organizations? This paper addresses the question by exploiting a unique database from a Senegalese network of 36 financial cooperatives. We scrutinize the loan-granting decisions, made jointly by the locally elected board and the top manager assigned by the central union of the network. Our findings are threefold. First, female-dominated boards favor social orientation. Second, female managers tend to align their strategy with local boards' preferences. Third, the central union tends to assign male managers to female-dominated boards, probably to curb the boards' social orientation.

The emerging field of common good socio-economics is promising not only for the preservation of common natural resources but also for common goods created by people through collective action, the importance of which has been emphasized by the recent financial and economic crisis. Based on the case of cooperative finance, this paper's outcomes are twofold. First, it shows that while the boundaries between the nature and property regime of goods may be relatively clear for natural common goods, they appear much more interlinked for human-made goods, where commons are embedded in intergenerational reciprocity. Second, it demonstrates that financial cooperatives can be understood as human-made commons and proposes a new way of thinking about public policies to design adequate legislation to protect these commons from isomorphism, privatization and destruction.2 Demutualization occurs when cooperative financial institutions are converted into stock companies, through the sale of 100% of the shares to depositors and insiders as part of an initial public offer.

Summary This paper investigates whether financial cooperatives are crowded out by commercial banks in the process of financial sector development. We use a self‐constructed database based on World Council of Credit Unions data for the years 1990‐2011 of cooperatives in 55 developing countries. Our empirical results are threefold. First, financial cooperatives tend to reach more members in countries where the commercial banking sector is weak. This validates their role as a banking market failure solution. Second, in the process of commercial bank expansion, financial cooperatives run the risk of being crowded out. Third, the relationship is actually complex, since financial cooperatives seem to benefit from some kind of bank presence, especially as far as savings mobilization is concerned.

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Cooperatives actively pursuing financial inclusion in West Africa could potentially benefit from a closer look at the historical Raiffeisen model, which may help them provide long‐term loans in rural areas through specific strategic changes.