Advancing the Theory of Cooperative Organization: Interrogating the Developing Country Perspectives

This paper attempts to theorize producers’ cooperatives as an organizational form in the context of developing countries, by using Williamson’s approach of comparative economic organizations. The idea of composite efficiency has been introduced here, by bringing in the notion of distributional efficiency. Detailed theorization of different types of organizations following the market-hierarchy continuum has been attempted. Institutional factors behind longevity, stability of cooperatives and logic behind coexistence of cooperatives along with hierarchical capitalist firms, by focusing on the Indian handloom weaving sector, have been theoretically established.