Rediscovering the Cooperative Enterprise: A Systematic Review of Current Topics and Avenues for Future Research

Abstract

For decades, the cooperative enterprise (CE) produces market goods and/or provides services in the interest to its members, such as communities, customers, and suppliers. The upsurge of interest in social enterprises, and their balancing of social and economic interests, has also led to a renewed interest in CEs, often seen as a specific type of social enterprise. However, from an organizational perspective, this renewed interest has been both limited and scattered over a variety of fields. In this paper, we systematically review papers on CE in the mainstream organizational literature, defined as literature in the fields of economics, business, management and sociology. Our review integrates and synthesizes the current topics in the mainstream organizational literature and provides a number of avenues for future research. In addition, we compare our findings in the organizational literature to the social issues literature as these appeared to be quite complimentary. We found multilevel studies, determination of social impact—in particular measurable impact, managerial practices for sustainable (organisational) development, and the entrepreneurial opportunity generation process as the four key avenues for future research.

Interfirm cooperatives enabling organizational ambidexterity, a case study of the printing industry in Colombia

“…Currently, it is proving difficult for SME owners to inspire second generations to become involved in their own business because many do not wish to follow in the footsteps of the first generation. This lack of successorship within SME members has a knock‐on effect on IFCs because this collective ownership of IFCs by multiple firms has a deep interdependency (Camargo Benavides & Ehrenhard, 2021). Therefore, commitment relies on members that want to continue working for a CE as an extension of their own company.…”

“…We acknowledge two main limitations in this study. Firstly, since a CE can take a variety of legal structures such as financial institution, credit provider, or agricultural cooperative (Mazzarol, Limnios, & Reboud, 2014) and types of CE in the market—as a worker CE, producer CE, seller CE, consumer CE, or purchasing CE (Camargo Benavides & Ehrenhard, 2021), we cannot generalize our findings for all types of CEs that exist. Our analysis was centered on specific type of CE: IFCs configured in a particular industrial setting that is embarking on a big leap from traditional manufacturing processes to a digital world within the emerging market context.…”

“…In emerging markets, the organizational form of the cooperative enterprise (CE) plays an important role in economic development by responding to societal needs, addressing socio‐economic problems, and overcoming market failures (Costa, Andreaus, Carini, & Carpita, 2012). In this study, we focus on a specific type of CE: the interfirm cooperative (IFC), which is a CE collectively owned by multiple firms in a specified relationship with a specific purpose (Camargo Benavides & Ehrenhard, 2021; Hendrikse & Feng, 2013). These SMEs are often less diversified and largely depend on local markets.…”

“…Studies on CEs have shown that market power and competition has pushed this type of organizational form to become highly efficient (Maietta & Sena, 2008), aiming to be a cost‐efficient player in their own industry (Alavosius, Getting, Dagen, Newsome, & Hopkins, 2009; Suzuki, 2009). So far, CE literature has mostly focussed on productivity, efficiency, and variance reduction for exploitation, but has devoted little attention to how CEs may facilitate experimentation, search, and variation for exploration (Camargo Benavides & Ehrenhard, 2021). Therefore, we know little about how CEs can strengthen their exploration potential, and even less about how ambidextrous behavior within an IFC and its members can be improved.…”

The franchise: from investment to entrepreneurship

“…Por la relevancia de la empresa, se ha estudiado su creación, desarrollo y gestión, desde diferentes perspectivas (Camargo y Ehrenhard, 2021). Entre estos enfoques se encuentran trabajos a nivel económico, político, administrativo, tecnológico, social, filosófico, motivacional y educativo (Forero y Durán, 2019;Rodríguez, 2009).…”