Big Business in the Social Commons: The Example of the Carrefour Varasti Agricultural Cooperative in Romania

If the commons were the subject of a revival with an explosion of their studies especially after the Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Elinor Ostrom in 2009, few of them approached them from the point of view of big business. The reason for this absence is undoubtedly due to the fact that many commons develop against big business, as an alternative model. However, with the new age of the commons, which sees them extend to all the dimensions of social life, this paradoxical encounter begins to take place. The first part of this paper deals with it from a theoretical point of view starting from the model of the social commons. The latter makes it possible to highlight two specificities of the social commons related to the big enterprise: their polycentrism, on the one hand, and their translocalism, on the other hand. The second part deals with a special case of social commons with a large company: the Carrefour cooperative in Varast, Romania. Its study first shows that this case responds well to the characteristics of any common social. It then indicates the specificities of such a social common in which the intervention of the large enterprise confers on the common a translocal structure. Finally, it concludes on the ambiguity of the encounter between the commons and the big company: between potential recovery of the commons by the logic of profit for the shareholder or, on the contrary, evolution of the large company towards a new logic of value in the territories.