Trust, Social Capital, and the Coordination of Relationships Between the Members of Cooperatives: A Comparison Between Member-Focused Cooperatives and Third-Party-Focused Cooperatives

Abstract

In recent years, nonprofit scholars have increasingly studied the phenomenon of social enterprises which has become a generic term describing a wider reorientation among third sector organizations. The emergence of social enterprises has also led to a dynamic of hybridization and broadening in the cooperative sector, similar to an earlier dynamic of "economization", but this time on the other end of the organizational spectrum. This paper aims at developing a finegrained conceptual understanding of how this organizational dynamic is shaped in terms of member coordination, thus contributing to a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of different organizational forms of cooperatives. Specifically, to highlight the difference to traditional member-focused cooperatives, the paper introduces the term third-party-focused cooperatives for those social enterprises which emphasize economic goals as well as control and ownership by a particular community (typically place-based). The key result of the paper is that with the shift from member-to community-focus in cooperatives, the main coordination mechanism becomes one of norm-based trust on the basis of generalized reciprocity. In contrast to traditional maxim-based trust member coordination on the basis of relation-specific reciprocity, this enables third-party-focused cooperatives to mobilize bridging and linking social capital, facilitating collective action aimed towards the community interest. The findings suggest that this identity shift requires a mutual re-positioning between the cooperative and the nonprofit sector, in terms of umbrellas as well as regulatory and legislative bodies.

Social Capital in Emerging Collaboration Between NPOs and Volunteers: Performance Effects and Sustainability Prospects in Disaster Relief

“…Structural embeddedness (Granovetter 1992) is a key to understand the characteristics of the network of relations. The linkages allow the network members access to resource exchange with other members (Hatak et al 2016). Some authors emphasize the role of a dense network structure for social capital building (Coleman 1990).…”

“…In addition to the analysis of separate effects of social capital components on collaborative disaster relief Voluntas (2019) 30:976-990 981 performance, we are also interested in exploring, how the interactions between the different social capital components affect the collaborative efforts. As previously mentioned, structural social capital represents the basis or rather the access point to knowledge exchange (Mäkelä et al 2012;Hatak et al 2016). Hence, we focused on the interaction effects of 'interaction frequency' and (a) cognitive and (b) relational social capital components.…”

Social Capital and Mutual Versus Public Benefit: The Case of Renewable Energy Cooperatives

“…In particular, the distinction between ‘public benefit’ and ‘mutual benefit’ organizations appears to be relevant in this respect (Somerville and McElwee ; Lang and Roessl ; Hatak et al. ). Historically, public benefit has been associated with non‐profit organizations and most charities, and mutual benefit with the whole range of cooperative and mutual organizations (Gui ; Ben‐Ner and Gui ).…”

“…In this perspective, these new models represent hybrids between traditional cooperatives and non‐profit organizations, combining key features of both legal forms (Defourny ; Spear and Bidet ; Hatak et al. ). One example of this renewal is provided by Italian social cooperatives, which started emerging in the late 1980s and combine characteristics of non‐profit voluntary organizations with the cooperative form (Borzaga and Santuari ; Mancino and Thomas ; Picciotti et al.…”

“…It has theoretically been argued that the type of social capital generated in cooperatives differs depending on how they prioritize mutual benefit or public benefit in their model (Hatak et al. ). Yet, very few studies to our knowledge have sought to analyze this question empirically.…”