The AGRICOMPET research team organized on September 1, 2023 a session on the role of social capital in agri-food cooperatives at the XVII EAAE Congress in Rennes, France. The annual conference of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE) focused this year on the Agri-Food Systems in a Changing World: Connecting Science and Society.
Professors Constantine Iliopoulos and Manuel González-Díaz put together a panel of researchers on the agricultural cooperative world who were also working on social capital. In addition, they invited Professor M. L. Cook (University of Missouri, USA), a recognized world expert on the cooperative world, to join them as discussants of the papers presented.
Four papers were presented, reflecting the interest in social capital among researchers in the cooperative sector worldwide. The papers addressed different aspects, starting with a theoretical model of how social capital evolves over the life cycle of cooperatives and what organizational consequences these changes cause. The second paper measures the positive effect of cognitive social capital on adopting environment-friendly practices by Chinese cooperatives. The third paper shows the parallelism between the organizational problems faced by cooperatives and the implementation of social aspects, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), in purely capitalist organizations, using a Luhmannian perspective. The last paper studies how the existence of implicit incentives derived from the presence of social capital influences the explicit incentives that have become widespread between cooperatives and members (e.g., variable payment to members for quality).
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