New institutional economists have identified a number of property rights problems in agricultural cooperatives. This paper reconsiders these problems from the perspective of heterodox institutionalist economics in the tradition of Veblen and Ayres. The property rights problems of agricultural...

The paper reconstructs the Veblenian critique of the pecuniary economy from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems. Luhmann argued that social systems relieve people from the overwhelming civilizational complexity, but develop autopoietic properties hindering...

Purpose – Managerial nonpecuniary preferences have been emphasised by the behavioural theories of nonprofit organisation but only weakly related to this organisation's market failure theories. The present paper aims to fill this gap by examining the ways in which the market failure-addressing...

This paper questions the designation of cooperatives as hybrids of market and hierarchy on the grounds that cooperatives possess more differences from these governance mechanisms than commonalities with them. It is argued that the definition of a governance mechanism’s hybridity depends...

While John R. Commons often referred to third sector organizations, such as associations, cooperatives, and trade unions, it is unclear how these organizations can be fitted into his transactional typology. This paper clarifies this problem by identifying two dimensions of bargaining,...

Third sector organisations play a prominent role in rural development. Yet, such organisations have been largely neglected by existing economic research. This paper examines the potential role of standard theories of the third sector and collective action in explaining the motivations to form...

The standard property rights approach to nonprofit organization claims that attenuation of property rights in the form of nondistribution constraint stimulates managerial shirking in nonprofit firms and thereby makes them less efficient than for-profit firms. This paper argues that this view...

This paper asks whether nonprofit organization can have a positive rationale in an economy based on the division of labor, taking into account that the process of the division of labor occurs through profit-motivated economic behavior. By reconsidering existing economic theories of nonprofit...

Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for community...