Cooperatives have been used by the inhabitants in rural areas to gain access to telecommunications. In Bolivia and Finland, for example, consumer cooperatives have been for many years the only mechanism to provide local telecommunication services to the whole country. This paper studies the effects of the Bolivian market’s structure on the development of competition as well as on universal acce...

We characterize how just-selfish workers are incompatible with long-run success in workers’ cooperatives. Emphasizing mutual monitoring as key to cooperatives’ organization design to combat “shirking” we discuss what possible mixes of behavioral types in the membership of a cooperative are compatible with sustainable success. Sustainability depends on social preferences and cooperative norms th...

Although informal waste collectors are sometimes organized in cooperatives, their working conditions remain extremely precarious and unsafe. The paper discusses the findings of action oriented, participatory qualitative research with several recycling groups in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil. During workshops with the recyclers mapping, acting, and drawing methods helped reveal he...

given the importance of cooperatives in women's empowerment and the necessity of improving their performance, the present study was conducted to investigate factors or constructs discriminating successful and non-successful women's cooperatives to recognize the enabling conditions for cooperative's success. this was a co relational-survey type research in which 12819 of the membe...

OBJECTIVES To quantify service integration achieved in the national exemplar programme for single call access to out of hours care through NHS Direct, and its effect on the wider health system. DESIGN Observational before and after study of demand, activity, and trends in the use of other health services. PARTICIPANTS 34 general practice cooperatives with NHS Direct partners (exemplars): fo...

The development of Renewable Energy (RE) has become a major societal challenge. Even though RE technology is improving fast, the general public has been slow to adopt it. Meanwhile many RE cooperatives have been created; they act as social entrepreneurs in utilizing the social capital of a community to engage the public. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to consider how they can contribute t...

Cooperatives are a fairly new form of economic system in Korea compared to the western nations, yet, it has caught many attentions since the Fundamental Cooperative Act was enacted in 2011. Korea, once a very traditional community-based society, used to develop similar systems such as dooreh and poomasi. Thus, cooperatives have been astonishingly gaining popularity in various aspects recently a...

The objective of this study is to understand the development of organic farmers' cooperatives in East China by exploring the introduction of an organic agriculture specialized farmers' cooperative in Jurong City, Jiangsu Province. This case study indicates that, with strong leadership and well-organized management, small farmerfl in China are able to become involved in organic farming. Deficien...