From Theory to Practice: Social Capital in Agricultural Cooperatives in Flanders, Belgium

Cooperatives are considered resilient enterprises in times of crisis, partly due to their social logic as eminent through cooperative values and principles, such as democratic governance. Increasingly, social capital theory has been applied to study cooperatives’ social relationships. In this chapter, we focus on the organizational level (Leana and Buren in Academy of Management Review 24:538–555, 1999), asking how the three dimensions of social capital as identified by Putnam (Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton University Press, 1993) and further recognized by Ostrom and Ahn (Foundations of social capital. Elgar, 2003), i.e. (i) trust, (ii) networks, and (iii) norms and rules, are manifesting across agri-food cooperatives in particular. Extant literature has thus far explored social capital either in large, homogeneous producer cooperatives, or exclusively considered recently emerging, rather alternative multistakeholder cooperatives. Overcoming the dichotomy from the literature, we used purposive sampling to investigate a maximal diversity of agricultural cooperatives in Flanders, Northern Belgium. Analyzing 26 semi-structured interviews, we first identified characteristics of “typical cases” to develop a typology of distinctive subtypes of agricultural cooperatives in Flanders. Second, the cooperatives’ interpretations of the three dimensions of social capital were explored, revealing considerable overlap with how cooperatives “live” and embed the principle of democratic governance. Third, a matrix was developed to link these dimensions to different subtypes of agricultural cooperatives, which in turn held theoretical and practical implications for humanistic management practices (Melé in Journal of Business Ethics 44:77–88, 2003; Pastoriza et al. in Journal of Business Ethics 78:329–341, 2008) in cooperatives.