Cooperative Business System of Dairy Sector in India : Role of State, Caste and Gender

The current financial crisis has led to a renewed interest in the study of differences among nations in their approaches to economic activities, a method that has been labelled as varieties of capitalism (Carney, Eric, & Yang, 2009). Cooperative is a significant mode of organizing around the world that is showing resilience to the current financial crisis(Birchall & Ketilson, 2009). In India, cooperatives have 230 million members covering 100% of villages (Das, Palai, & Das, 2006). Despite cooperative‟s extensive reach and impact; there is no literature on cooperatives from a business system perspective as conceptualized by Whitley. This paper applies the business system perspective(Whitley, 1999) to cooperatives and explores the extent and the ways in which institutions affect cooperative business system. We specifically explore the role of state (given its overwhelming dominance over the cooperatives in India), caste (a social institution that is unique to India) and gender. This paper explores how gendered division of labour impacts interest group and how interest group affects work system. Our initial findings have implications for extending business system framework from a caste and gender perspective. We use Rajasthan Cooperative Dairy Federation (RCDF) as a context to illustrate our thesis. RCDF was chosen because (1) Rajasthan is one of the states of India steeped in traditions. Caste and gender have a strong impact on the culture and institutions of Rajasthan; (2) Different states of India have different cultures and we wanted to control for state level effects; (3) the first author resides in Rajasthan and had access to RCDF