ABSTRACT
As noted at the beginning of this Part of the book, cooperation was, originally, a reaction to capitalism expected to produce ‘a new social order’. Ideally, the socioeconomic ‘double nature’ of cooperatives that emerged at a later stage, was not necessarily due to become a source of tension, leaving each cooperative to dose the two components according to its needs, as part of a broader macro project. With time, however, the subordination of the economic to the social (embeddedness) within the cooperative – or attempts to do so – was not matched by similar trends in the outer world. Cooperatives, as often as not, succumbed to the temptation to assimilate to the dominant economic system. The latter served as a major term of reference for both components of the cooperative, since the association often failed to perform its role of definiens of the enterprise.
