Informing Measurement of Cooperative Performance

Prior work assessing cooperative performance focuses mostly on available financial accounting measures commonly used to evaluate investor owned firms. Here, we advance a more inclusive approach, which incorporates several aspects of performance consistent with the dual objectives of the cooperative form. We demonstrate that cooperative performance consists of multiple dimensions and that a survey item about overall performance adequately reflects variation in each of these dimensions of performance across cooperatives. Hence, this item may be used to compare performance across cooperatives with reasonable confidence. Though comparisons of cooperative financial statistics may be misleading when considered alone, future work that simultaneously assesses these statistics along with other dimensions of performance may provide insight into tradeoffs cooperatives make—sacrificing on one performance attribute for better performance on another. The degree of correspondence among these aspects of performance appears to vary by cooperative type. For instance, multipurpose cooperatives using cost of goods sold accounting behave more like IOFs in terms of financial performance than marketing cooperatives, which are predominately concerned with paying patron-members the highest possible prices for their products and generally use a pooling approach to accounting.