Presentation: Mapping Co-operative Studies in the New Millennium

My premise is that culture affects economic behavior. I am going to discuss how the concept of service offered by regional and local farm supply and grain cooperatives has evolved in the last 20 years. Service started out being a producer-driven concept associated with cultural expectations of entitlement. The institutional framework for realizing these expectations was multi-commodity cooperatives like Farmland, Countrymark, and Agway. The producer’s needs were foregrounded in this setting. Service has ended up by being defined as a market-driven concept, where the needs of the customer become paramount. The institutional framework has evolved to an industrialized agriculture, where producers have become backgrounded and cooperative identity has coalesced around participation in value-added food chains. In this context, being a low cost supplier or getting a high price becomes the key definition of service. Typically, economists have not paid much attention to culture. Economists treat most decisions as a matter of prices and quantities or financial considerations like interest rates. Cooperative management, members and directors also have no