Agricultural Co-operatives: A Struggle for Identity

By reviewing the most influential literature on the theory of agricultural cooperatives, we try to elucidate the multilayered nature of both their structure and purpose, and place this into the wider context of the ever present debate on the true nature of cooperative identity. To this end, we ask two questions. The first one concerns the nature of the cooperative enterprise and helps us underline the relevance of an old debate on whether cooperatives are a form of vertical integration, a firm, or a nexus of contracts and coalition. By providing a historical overview of the theoretical responses to this issue we will highlight the internal complexities of the ownership-governance-benefit cooperative structure. The second question can be interpreted as an invitation to future research. We suggest that there is a need to reflect again on the role of cooperatives’ embeddedness in their institutional context in the process of understanding and shaping cooperative identity.