Economics and Management of Cooperatives Organizations

This book is a collection of academic essays on the organizational economics of cooperatives. The main purpose is to explain the essential concepts of the contractual logic of governance in cooperatives. Most of these essays were presented as part of the academic discussions and meetings of the International Cooperative Alliance Committee on Cooperative Research. This piece is organized in three parts. The first part explains the history of cooperatives in Latin America and Brazil, their path to dependence and the institutional origins of their contractual architecture. The second part discusses the principal characteristics of cooperatives’ contractual architecture in Brazil, and the final part examines the comparative choice among different contractual forms of cooperative organization and explores the distinction between cooperative and non-cooperative enterprises. I hope that this book will contribute to an understanding cooperatives which are structured around a particular logic based on informal relational contracts, and provide an academic contribution based on New Institutional Economics and Transaction Costs Theory.