ABSTRACT
At the end of chapter 9 we said that ‘(…) even when cooperatives are enabled to become big and strong, they risk questioning their identity’. We are now in a position to suggest that this can result from a deliberate policy determined by the cooperatives themselves, or from an external intervention. In the first case, the cooperative takes a course that encourages its assimilation to the rules of the free market. In the second case, an intervention of the government may question the particular role of cooperatives in society. In both cases the specificity of the cooperative is challenged to the detriment of the cooperative movement and to the benefit of the free market logic. Conversion strategies in North America and the 2001 debate on the Italian Cooperative Law Reform have offered examples of the first and second case, respectively. We can thus learn that if a cooperative grows beyond a certain limit, it invites external investors to take hold of it (‘capitalists know better how to administer accumulated capital’), or becomes de-legitimatised by the government (‘big enterprises are camouflaged as ‘cooperatives’ just to benefit from tax exemptions and should be converted into common business companies’). This points to the incompatibility between economic growth and non-economic considerations. These can be tolerated, at best, in small-sized-’social’ cooperatives.
