Making farmers cooperatives work

This book offers an alternative approach to the study of co-operatives. Its purpose is to evolve and test a theoretical framework to under stand the working and performance of a village co-operative or any other local organisation as a live entity embedded in its social context. Our approach claims advantage over existing approaches in its accent on central tendencies rather than on the extremes, and in its ability to explain successes as well as failures. Finally, our approach-which brings the co-operative's members, managers and leaders at the centre of our enquiry-offers a guide for action useful to them, something that many existing approaches fail to do.

The arguments of this book move in tandem with those developed in its companion volume, 'Catalysing Co-operation: Design of Self governing People's Organisations' (Shah, 1992). In the present book, we focus on a village co-operative affiliated to a federal co-operative system; in 'Catalysing Co-operation' we deal with the co-operative system as a whole, whether federal or unitary. While the issues addressed, frameworks evolved and methods used are vastly dif ferent, both the volumes share a distinct and simple core theory. The central argument is that the success of a co-operative, either at the village level or the entire federal system, depends upon how effectively it serves purposes central to its user members; and how effectively the co-operative does this depends critically on how well it gets designed to do so.)