Toward a Social Capital Theory of Cooperative Organisation

The paper is aimed at developing an approach to an economic rationalisation of cooperative organisation and argues that the latter represents a special, social capital-based, type of organisation in the sense that: 1) it is based on social capital in the same way as market and hierarchy are respectively based on price and authority relation; 2) social capital is the major resource of organisations governed on the basis of cooperative principles. The approach is applied to the following issues: the problem of social orientation of cooperatives; comparative analysis of 'capitalistic' and cooperative organisation; the meaning of cooperative principles