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This work presents a history of the co-operative firm in China from its origins in the early twenth century. The aim is to describe how in its evolution, the Chinese Co-operative Movement has diverged from the western notion of a co-operative. To understand the similarities and the divergence, we will consider a number of economic and cultural fact...
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... The vast majority (over 99%) of villagers in all three of our sites were members of the NACMIS (New Agricultural Cooperative Medical Insurance Scheme, xin nong he, 新农合). VCs and THCs have to work with NRCMIS, but the process of insurance reimbursement for a patient's medical care is not straightforward and cannot be covered here (seeBernardi and Miani, 2014).Frontiers in Sociology | www.frontiersin.org ...
Primary care clinicians in rural China are required to balance their immediate duty of care to their patients with patient expectations for antibiotics, financial pressures, and their wider responsibilities to public health. The clinicians in our sample appear to make greater efforts in managing immediate clinical risks and personal reputation than in considering the long-term consequences of their actions as potentially contributing to antimicrobial resistance. This paper employs Bourdieu's theory of capital to examine the perspectives and practices of Chinese primary care clinicians prescribing antibiotics at low-level health facilities in rural Anhui province, China. We examine the institutional context and clinical realities of these rural health facilities and identify how these influence the way clinicians utilize antibiotics in the management of common upper respiratory tract infections. Confronted with various official regulations and institutional pressures to generate revenues, informants' desire to maintain good relations with patients coupled with their concerns for patient safety result in tensions between their professional knowledge of “rational” antibiotic use and their actual prescribing practices. Informants often deferred responsibility for antimicrobial stewardship to the government or upper echelons of the healthcare system and drew on the powerful public discourse of “suzhi” (human quality) to legitimize their liberal prescribing of antibiotics in an imagined socioeconomic hierarchy. The demands of both practitioners' and patients' social, cultural, and economic forms of capital help to explain patterns of antibiotic prescribing in rural Chinese health facilities.
... Maoism has represented a deviation from the western, or, indeed, international notion of co-operation. The Maoist version of co-operation, even more than the Soviet one, has instead represented a discontinuity from the traditional idea of co-operation ( Fairbank, 1987, 1992; Bernardi and Miani, 2014). The history of Chinese co-operation, excluding the primordial forms of informal co-operation widely present in ancient civilizations worldwide (in China connected to the management of water for agricultural purposes), seems to date from the first decade of the twentieth century. ...
Cooperatives and China Gung Ho is the oldest Chinese cooperative association and is the closest to the principles of the international cooperative movement. It is not, however, the biggest and the most powerful cooperative organization in China. This chapter explains why. The origin and the role of cooperation in Asia, and particularly in China and other countries with a Confucian culture, have received relatively little attention in scholarly research (Taimni, 2000; Bernardi and Miani, 2014). In 1844, the first modern cooperative organized around a formal business model was established in Rochdale. In the following 150 years, the modern cooperative became a worldwide model of economic organization in agriculture, retail, manufacturing, services and banking sectors (Birchall, 1997) and arrived in Asia with a few decades of delay. The modern form of cooperative arrived in China at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This paper provides an integrated analysis of the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital in cooperatives. The social capital concept is integrated with cooperative lifecycle theory to describe the change of cooperative social capital along the lifecycle. We propose that cooperatives in different stages of the lifecycle are featured with different levels of social capital. Cooperatives usually enjoy a high level of social capital in the early stages of the lifecycle. However, the level of social capital in cooperatives exhibits a declining trend along the development of the organization. The decrease of social capital will lead to an imbalance of the social and economic attributes of cooperatives. The cooperative’s governance structure must change accordingly. We argue that it is important for cooperatives to maintain and develop the social capital strategically over time. Otherwise, the comparative advantage of the cooperative business form may disappear.
This book represents an idea that has been put into practice and a gamble that has paid off. It is the result of an exchange of ideas that took place between Professor Monni and me when I was President of the Italian
Co-operative Alliance and it uses the ‘traditional’ structure of a dictionary to present a series of ‘keywords’, with the aim of helping us to gain a greater understanding of co-operative enterprises. It has two aims: one is to present co-operation to a wide audience by clearly explaining its main characteristics and the other is to provide those who are already familiar with and interested in co-operation with new ways of interpreting and understanding a phenomenon that over a period of 170 years has spread to numerous different countries and fields. In order to meet these aims, academics from various countries, representatives of international institutions, and members of the co-operative world have come together as a collective authorship. The array of themes explored reveals the very distinctive nature of the co-operative, leading us through the co-operative business model, its social and economic impact, its organizational structure, and its system of values. If we glance through the entries that represent co-operative enterprises – ranging from work and participation to safety and well-being, workers’ buyouts, control and governance, rural development and co-operative quality – we are confronted with an expressive and complex system whose key principle is yet refreshingly simple: that people play a central role. The co-operative, as shown by both its historical evolution and by more recent developments, which have seen the model spreading to new areas of activity and organization, is at root a social infrastructure, a tool that allows people to find responses to their needs within a framework of
shared responsibility, solidarity, and active participation. Co-operatives are a vital tool for implementing and affirming the socially important role of citizens as a fundamental part of economic and social growth. Such
growth, especially given events and experiences of recent years, should no longer be the prerogative of two institutions – the state and the market – who, in a traditional approach, were chiefly, if not exclusively, assigned
this task. Challenging this model and tradition, co-operatives are an opportunity for all those who want to play an active part in shaping the future of their own community.
The article contributes to understanding the added value of cooperatives in a people-centred development setting. In particular, it explores cooperatives as institutions for human development and it analyzes factors that can convert the participation in cooperatives into members’agency and capability expansion.
L’articolo contribuisce a studiare il valore aggiunto delle cooperative in un contesto di sviluppo incentrato sulle persone. In particolare, esamina le cooperative come istituzioni per lo sviluppo umano e analizza i fattori che possono favorire la conversione della participazione in cooperativa nell’ espansione dell’ agency e delle capabilities dei soci.
Whether you think you know all there is to know or you know next to nothing about the co-operative sector, this book is for you. An A to Z of the co-operative movement, this collection of short essays will introduce you to the diverse, broad, and multifaceted world of co-operatives. Co-operatives have a very long history, yet are still out there competing with their capitalist rivals in almost every market and every industry. They are rooted in revolutionary ideas, yet are more feasible and effective than many attempted revolutions, and they provide work, goods, and services to hundreds of millions of members in virtually every corner of the globe. If you know little but want to know more, read some or all of the 23 stories of co-operative theory, history, and practice, written by world-leading experts. If you are already a co-operative member, an academic, or a practitioner with experience in the field, this straight-talking and jargon-free book will present new and exciting perspectives on a field you (think you) already know.
If you are looking for a different way to produce goods and deliver services to your community and if you aspire to a a different market, a different firm, or form of work, this book is for you. A succinct but provocative guide to the on-going, pragmatic revolution that is the co-operative sector, a revolution in ownership that we should all embrace after the failure of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Table of contents
The Editors
The Contributors
Preface (G. Poletti)
A dictionary of the multifaceted co-operative world (The Editors)
Acknowledgements
A: Co-operative Alliances, Italy (M. Lusetti)
B: Workers’ Buyout (M. Vieta)
C: Control and Governance (J. Birchall)
D: Rural Development (M. Rocchigiani, N. Ourabah Haddad, D. Herbel)
E: Empowerment (F. Burchi, S. Vicari)
F: Recovered Factories (F. Vigliarolo)
G: Gung Ho (A. Bernardi)
H: Human Development (S. Vicari, S. Monni, P. De Muro)
I: International Co-operative Law (G. Fajardo García)
K: Keywords (F. Martello, R. Tomlinson)
L: Labour and Participation (T. Treu)
M: Mutuals and Local Utilities (S. Monni, G. Novelli, L. Pera)
N: New Media (M. Miani)
O: Occupy Wall Street (A. Bernardi)
P: Labour Productivity (P. Tridico)
Q: Co-operative Quality (V. Mannino)
R: Resilience (A. Borda-Rodriguez, S. Vicari)
S: Safety and Well-Being (J. Muñoz)
T: Textbooks (P. Kalmi)
U: United Nations and Co-operatives (H. Henrÿ)
V: Venture Capital (Mutualistic) (G. Di Cecco)
W: War (G. R. Dulcey Martínez)
Z: Zeitgeist, Educating Diversity (A. Bernardi, S. Monni)
Contributors’ profiles
