ABSTRACT
The following case studies are not a representative or random sample but rather a ‘purposive’ one, consisting of a number of ‘critical’ and ‘typical’ cases (Guba and Lincoln, 1989, p.178) from the extant literature and our personal research experience. Analysing these cases aims to test the practical relevance of our theoretical propositions regarding the possible relations between the socioeconomic components of cooperatives and the symbolic/imaginary (S/I) categories of thought and the embeddedness/disembeddedness paradigm, in diverse socioeconomic settings. Given the newness of the issues and the difficulty of their measurement, our approach is forcibly a qualitative one that examines the possibility to generate a tentative typology of situations.
