Organizational Charting for Member Control in Cooperatives: Toward an Assessment Tool

A fundamental aspect of cooperative organizations is “member control” or member governance of the organization. Member control is facilitated through a series of member offices, elections to those offices, and organizational bylaws. When challenges to the legitimacy of cooperative organization occurs, those challenges often revolve around questions of member control. Do members actually control the cooperative? Our current era is of no exception given a context of acquisitions, mergers, and joint ventures in the cooperative community. This report presents a series of membership charts, from simple to complex, demonstrating various ways to depict a membership structure, with the explicit highlighting of mechanisms for member control. The report begins with simple depictions of macro-membership structures, e.g. local, centralized and federated. It culminates with a “containment” method that is able to illustrate appointed and elected positions, positions with and without decision-making authority, a basis of representation in geographic districts, flows and levels of authority, and whether authority is contained by the membership or outside of members’ control and oversight.