Italian Cooperatives Research Articles

Factors Affecting Intention to Quit Among Welfare Workers: The Beneficial Effects of Job Resources

Issues related to workers' intention to quit are of great interest in consideration of the even more important role of Human Capital in modern economy. Relatively little is known of the relationship between intention to quit and job resources, even as a growing number of studies have been recently published linking job resources to individual outcome (e.g. job satisfaction and work engagement). Further, few works have focused on welfare workers in the current debate. The welfare sector in Italy is in large part managed by non-profit organizations. These organizations in the last decades have experienced high degrees of turnover and difficulties in retaining core workers. From this arises the concern for the antecedents of the intention to leave the organization. The purpose of this paper is to explore quitting behaviors of employees in welfare organizations by considering job resources as possible determinants of workers' retention. The empirical part of the paper is developed with an analysis made through a questionnaire administered to a sample of 139 welfare workers in six Italian social cooperatives. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis reveled the importance of some job resources, such as career opportunities and training possibilities, in explaining the reduction in intention to leave the organization for these workers. This study offers suggestions for the promotion of employees retention in welfare sector.

Changes in the Italian Economy: The Cooperatives

This work compares cooperatives with other firms along two lines: (1) a description of structural development; and (2) a comparison of the strategies in response to the changes in the competitive environment in the last decade. Between 2001 and 2009, compared with other types of firms, Italian cooperatives maintained their greater size, lower labour productivity and labour costs, and a similar level of profit margins. A survey conducted on a sample of cooperatives located in the region of Emilia-Romagna shows that cooperatives have adapted their strategies to the new context in the same way as other firms. Cooperatives are still more focused on core business and differentiate their products less; this exposes them to greater price competition.

The Creation of New Entities: Stakeholders and Shareholders in 19th Century Italian Co-Operatives

The numerous studies made of the persistence of the co-operative movement during the course of the 20th century, have often distinguished between economic efficiency and the ethical values (or ideologies) in question, as if the two were separate phenomena moving in parallel directions. However, over the past fifteen years at least two approaches have led to an interweaving of the cultural aspects of co-operation with the question of economic efficiency: the Putnam’s concept of social capital and the property rights model based on the work of Henry Hansmann. In associating myself with an approach, where efficiency is linked with “culture,” I wish to examine the cultural components of the Italian co-operative movement which emerged from three different socio-cultural traditions: liberalism, catholicism and socialism. Despite their differences, all three seem to share what we refer to here as the “ideal of community happiness,” that is the ideal of a collaboration among citizens for the improvement of the standard of living of the whole community. In this paper we will measure the popularity of this culture in the various Italian regions by per capita welfare expenditure in 1880 and 1900. At that time everything spent for helping people in need was given by friendly societies, catholic charities and local councils and nothing came from the central state. Therefore only the spreading of non-profit societies and a proactive attitude by local councils could generate high per capita welfare expenditure. Indeed, such indicator would seem to be closely linked to co-operative expansion during the second half of the 19th century, and would thus appear to provide an explanation for the non-homogeneous geographical distribution of Italian co-operatives. The main conclusion of this essay is that in the early stages the link with the political and cultural movements was crucial not only for the emergence but above all for the viability of cooperative enterprises by reducing the costs associated with collective decision making.

Measuring the Quality of Work: The Case of the Italian Social Cooperatives

Quality of work has within a short time become a major subject of study and discussion in labour economy. Its quantification is a challenging task because it implies the translation of various subjective perceptions into a single objective measure (composite indicator). In this paper, the method used to construct measures is the Rating Scale Model and the available data come from the Survey on Italian Social Cooperatives carried out in 2007. The validity of the obtained Rasch measures is tested with respect to some overall variables of the quality of work. Moreover, using inferential confidence intervals, these measures are utilized to evaluate the differences in the perception of the quality of work due to worker (gender, age and education) and cooperative (type, dimension and geographic area) characteristics, work characteristics (service area, membership, time and type of contract) and work incentives (economic, professional and learning).

Cooperative Networks in the Italian Economy

This paper analyzes cooperative enterprises' networks in the Italian economy, in accordance with recent economic theory, to throw light on the causes of their success of in the last 30 years. We reference the vast literature about business networks to identify some interpretative lines that can be transferred to the cooperative world. On this basis, a typology of the Italian cooperative networks is offered, in order to evaluate the competitive advantages of each type of net, their governance methods, their evolution, and their impact on the recent flourishing of Italian cooperatives. Our conclusion is that the use of networks by co-ops has been very intensive and can still be strengthened, if Italian co-op umbrella organizations will merge. Building large cooperative corporations was often the result of networking, as was the creation of joint stock companies owned by cooperatives.

Cooperative Networks in the Italian Economy

This paper analyzes cooperative enterprises' networks in the Italian economy, in accordance with recent economic theory, to throw light on the causes of their success of in the last 30 years. We reference the vast literature about business networks to identify some interpretative lines that can be transferred to the cooperative world. On this basis, a typology of the Italian cooperative networks is offered, in order to evaluate the competitive advantages of each type of net, their governance methods, their evolution, and their impact on the recent flourishing of Italian cooperatives. Our conclusion is that the use of networks by co-ops has been very intensive and can still be strengthened, if Italian co-op umbrella organizations will merge. Building large cooperative corporations was often the result of networking, as was the creation of joint stock companies owned by cooperatives.

Collective Accumulation of Capital in Italian Worker Cooperatives Between Employment Insurance and 'We-Rationality': An Empirical Investigation

A distinguishing feature of Italian worker cooperatives is the propensity to reinvest a huge share of profits into asset locks, a common fund, non divisible and non appropriable by members, even at the end of the cooperative’s life. This work investigates the reasons for this practice, after discussing the most common interpretations provided by the literature. The hypothesis that is suggested is that asset locks play a significant role in employment stabilization. This can, indeed, be obtained in two ways: by letting wages fluctuate, or by accumulating reinvested profits into an “insurance” fund that allows the organization to face downturns without firing anyone and, at the same time, without reducing wages. In this second case, asset locks have an employment insurance and income smoothing role. This study, then, incorporates two further factors: the long-term time horizon of workers within the cooperative and the elements of “collective rationality” they may display. Together with the theoretic discussion, some empirical results are provided by means of a case study on the worker cooperatives affiliated to the Legacoop Ravenna, both analyzing firm-level data and individual survey data.

Cooperatives’ Tax Regimes, Political Orientation of Governments and Rent Seeking

The paper focuses on the strict relation between the continuous changes of the diversified tax regimes of the various types of cooperatives and the political composition of the governments succeeding each other in Italy from the after war period to the present. It emerged that the different types of cooperatives prevailing in the leftwing League of Cooperatives or in the Confederation of Italian Cooperatives (CCI) of catholic orientation or in both organization had a different possibility of exerting successful rent seeking with the various Governments with different political orientation. Consumption cooperatives operating in the mass retail which obtained generous tax treatments by Governments leaning to the left, lost most of them by centre right Governments. The cooperatives of agriculture and food processing, those of small fishing and those of production and labor, important both in the League and in CCI, were able to obtain from different Governments special privileges in the postwar period and kept most of them also under the centre right Governments of the last period. Social cooperatives object of a special legislation in 1992 under a Government of Giulio Andreotti, a leader close to the catholic organizations, kept their preferential tax regime with all the subsequent governments. They are important both in CCI and in the League and have a peculiar electoral power because of their capillary activities.

Creation, Maintenance and Dissipation of the Relational Social Capital within Social Cooperative Enterprises: The Systemic Thinking Perspective

Theories on social capital and their effects on social entrepreneurship has mainly underlined the power of social capital to generate enterprises and to foster good relations between third sector organizations and public sector. This paper proposes a different perspective to consider role in build social capital of a third sector enterprise: multistakeholder social cooperative are seen, at the same time, as social capital result, creators, and incubators. To represent this perspective we’ll use a qualitative system dynamic approach in which social capital is measured throw some proxy. Italian Social cooperatives has become during last twenty years main producers of social welfare service: some of them adopt a multistakeholder governance model and declare themselves as “community enterprise” choosing to represent “general interest of the community and integrating in an enterprise activity”. Sometimes they operate integrating disadvantaged people in work activities,these are work integration social enterprise, some of them, as effect of local authorities contracts. are involved in managing public services. Often these typology of social enterprises are engaged by people who come from third sector organizations and this is the way in which they continue their personal commitment in social enterprises. These people bring their relation and these “personal weak ties” are fundamental in developing cooperatives: so social capital developed in other third sector entities is transferred in multistakeholder cooperative. Cooperation of voluntary, customers, community leaders and third sector local organizations are fundamental to establish trust relations between cooperative and public local authorities. These relations help cooperatives to have long term contracts with local authorities contract as provider of social services and make them possible to innovate the services, developing experiences and management models and exchanging them with the public officers. The long-term relations and the organizational relations that linked social cooperatives and public organizations contribute to create and renovate social capital. In this way multistakeholder cooperatives originated by social capital developed in third sector organizations produce new social capital within the cooperatives and between cooperatives (entrepreneurial components of third sector) and public sector. In their entrepreneurial life cooperatives has to contrast the “working drift” in which only workers remain as members of the cooperative while others stakeholders (volunteers, customer, local social leaders) don’t continue their participation in cooperative. These people different from workers are (stake)holders of “weak ties” fundamental to make a worker’s cooperative an authentic social multistakeholders cooperative. To maintain the multistakeholders governance, and the relations with third sector and civil society, social cooperative has to reinforce participation and dialogue with civil society through continue effort of inclusion of people bringing social proposal. We try to represent these process in a system dynamic model, measuring social capital created by social cooperatives through some proxy as number of volunteers and deep cooperation with public institution. Using a reverse-engineering approach we can individuate the determinants of the creation of social capital and so give support to governance that create social capital. In this way, relations between third sector, public sector are at the same time in a social multistakeholder enterprise resulting and building social capital.

New evidence on wages and employment in worker cooperatives compared with capitalist firms

This article presents new econometric evidence on the comparative behavior of worker cooperatives and capitalist firms, highlighting the differences in wages and employment responses. We use a comprehensive panel data set that covers the entire population of cooperatives and their capitalist counterparts registered in the social security records in Uruguay from April 1996 to December 2005. We analyze the data to study the employment and wage decisions in both types of enterprises, the results of which suggests that their adjustment mechanisms to idiosyncratic price changes and macroeconomic shocks may differ greatly. The data set also allows us to estimate wage and employment variations for members and non-members of cooperatives separately, and provides an empirical test for the so-called degeneration hypothesis. Our findings are broadly consistent with previous studies for Italian cooperatives and plywood cooperatives in the United States. As studies of this kind are so few, our research provides a significant contribution to the empirical literature on labor managed firms. Moreover, comparing worker cooperatives and capitalist firms offers an exceptional opportunity to determine how control by workers may lead to different organizational behavior.

Technical efficiency in the fresh fruit and vegetable sector: a comparison study of Italian and Spanish firms

Introduction. Agricultural cooperatives play an important socio-economic role in European (EU) countries, especially in the fresh fruit and vegetable sector. For this reason, in an economic perspective, the measurement of their efficiency has become an area of investi- gation which attracts great interest. Given that Spain and Italy are the biggest producers of fresh fruits and vegetables, the aim of this paper was to recognize the evolution of their technical effi- ciency. Materials and methods. Performance analysis in the economic field is rather contro- versial. Following Parkan (2002), it is possible to classify three main approaches to measure performance: index numbers; frontier methods and the non-parametric approaches. In this paper, efficiency was evaluated by applying the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique considering two separate frontiers. Through the AIDA database for Italian agricultural coope- ratives and the SABI database for Spanish cooperatives, two different sets of 81 and 106 firms, respectively belonging to the fruit and vegetable sector, were selected over a five-year period (2001-2005). Results. The analysis of the DEA results underlines the higher ability of Italian coo- peratives to calibrate and optimize the inputs, and to maximize the results (technical efficiency), as well as the ability of Spanish cooperatives to exploit scale economies. Conclusions. Over the period taken into consideration, the average value of global technical efficiency decreased for Spanish as well as Italian cooperatives. In the case of Spanish cooperatives, this situation is due to the loss of ability to calibrate and optimize the inputs, even if the considered firms reveal ability to develop scale economies. In the case of Italian cooperatives, the results reveal the subs- tantial firm technical efficiency, even if scale inefficiency undermines the global efficiency. Spain / Italy / fruits / vegetables / cooperatives / economic analysis / efficiency Efficacite technique du secteur des fruits et legumes frais : une etude comparee des societes italiennes et espagnoles.

Shadow price of capital and the FurubotnPejovich effect: Some empirical evidence for Italian wine cooperatives

We test the underinvestment hypothesis (the so-called FurubotnPejovich effect) from the specialized literature on co-ops by comparing the shadow price of capital and the dual capacity utilization i...

Innovation and market strategy in Italian industrial cooperatives: Econometric evidence on organizational comparative advantage

This paper argues that more than one type of organizational form can be simultaneously efficient within an industry when differentiation in product qualities are significant. Firms with some exogenous or persistent component to their organizational structure will specialize in product qualities for which their organizational structure puts them at an advantage relative to other firms. This framework is used in an empirical study of innovation and market strategy of industrial cooperatives. Results of management surveys of Italian cooperatives on company strategy are combined with company financial data to test the hypothesis that industrial cooperatives will hold organizational comparative advantages in innovative activity which stresses the production knowledge of ordinary employees, in high quality products, and in the use of specialized corporate alliances. Strong evidence supporting the hypotheses are found when the performance of the firm is measured by its profitability and income per member.

Farmer Cooperatives in International Grain and Oilseed Markets

In recent years, several grain and oilseed producer cooperatives have expanded operations in international marketing. Some of these expansions include the purchase of part of Alfred C. Toepfer Co., an international commodity trading company, by several North American and European cooperatives; the expansion of Japanese cooperatives into U.S. grainhandling and storage functions; integration of Italian cooperatives into processing industries in developing countries; and the enlargement of one interregional cooperative into the fourth largest U.S. grain exporter. We suggest that these innovations are preliminary signals of a structural change in international grain trade. Our objective is to examine the changing role of farmer cooperatives in the complex international arena of grain and oilseed trade. Four phenomena are explored: (a) farmer cooperative location in the world soybean, coarse grain, and wheat market structure; (b) market share trends of U.S. cooperatives at the local, regional, and export levels; (c) the increasing importance of foreign cooperatives in the international grain trade; and (d) factors that might constrain or enhance the growth of cooperatives in the world grain trade.