In vielen Teilen der Welt, in Entwicklungs- wie Industrieländern, wird landwirtschaftliche und ländliche Entwicklung durch zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen (ZGO) unterstützt. In Deutschland ist ihre Aktivität mittlerweile so hoch, dass ihnen seitens Wissenschaft und Politik gestiegener...

Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for community...

ABSTRACT Social capital is defined as the shared knowledge, trust, and culture, embodied in the structural forms of networks and other stable inter-agent relationships. Social capital has been shown to be more difficult to build than economic capital, and to have greater beneficial effects for...

New institutional economists have identified a number of property rights problems in agricultural cooperatives. This paper reconsiders these problems from the perspective of heterodox institutionalist economics in the tradition of Veblen and Ayres. The property rights problems of agricultural...

The paper explores the way the work of classic institutionalist authors can inform modern nonprofit economics. From the perspective of Thorstein Veblen, nonprofit organisation is explained as an institutional consequence of the pecuniary-industrial dichotomy. John R. Commons' institutional...

This paper questions the designation of cooperatives as hybrids of market and hierarchy on the grounds that cooperatives possess more differences from these governance mechanisms than commonalities with them. It is argued that the definition of a governance mechanism’s hybridity depends...

While John R. Commons often referred to third sector organizations, such as associations, cooperatives, and trade unions, it is unclear how these organizations can be fitted into his transactional typology. This paper clarifies this problem by identifying two dimensions of bargaining,...

The economic nature of agricultural cooperatives is explained by means of a logical continuation of the organizational economics rationale for family farms. The traditional explanations of the importance of family farms is discussed, and embedded in a broader framework which considers their...

This paper explores the meaning of Veblenian instrumental value from the perspective of two strands of twentieth-century systems literature: the theories of Niklas Luhmann and C. West Churchman. The distinct Veblenian approach to defining instrumental value is in terms of the "generic ends of...

In developing his famous theory of social costs, K. William Kapp claimed to draw inspiration from the theory of open systems. The present paper reconstructs the notion of social costs from the perspective of the Luhmannian theory of autopoietic social systems, an alternative systems-theoretic...