Agricultural Producer Cooperatives as Strategic Alliances

In this paper we examine the linkages between four bodies of business-to-business relationship theory (transaction cost analysis, the resource-based theory of the firm (RBV), social network theory and theories of trust and cooperation) to the design and governance of agricultural cooperatives. Defining a cooperative broadly as any type of alliance formed by producers for their mutual benefit, we base the discussion on three types of cooperative; traditional, "new generation" and learning networks. Our main focus is on cooperatives as an alliance between members, but we also discuss alliances between cooperatives We find that there is a gap in the literature relating to the analysis of alliances with more than two members (such as cooperatives), so the linkages between the theories and cooperative types must be seen as being somewhat tentative. We hypothesise that the RBV, social network theory and trust and cooperation theories are in fact, applicable to multiple-member alliances, but their relevance is likely to become less as the number of members increase.