Building an agreement in a farming cooperative governance: A Sociology of conventions approach

Svetlana Serdyukov & François Grima (2024)

European Management Journal, Online first

Abstract. This study examines how a board of directors and management team establish an agreement under an agricultural cooperative governance structure. We carried out a case study of an agricultural cooperative based in France, the board members and management team of which were interviewed and observed for over four years regarding their ability to create and maintain an agreement in the governance of the cooperative. Building on the theory of conventions, our findings indicate that board members’ and managers’ hybridity constitutes the basis for establishing a compromise and developing a trusting relationship between board members and managers. Furthermore, we highlighted the chairperson’s crucial role in building, negotiating, and permanently repairing cohesion between these two bodies. Our study contributes to a more holistic understanding of the relationship between the board and management by explaining how previous experiences in different “worlds” (e.g., farming, cooperative, commercial) create hybrid individuals and how this facilitates agreement between actors with different dominant logics.

Extract: “Our results provide reassuring answers about this new way of managing a cooperative. Similarly to Rolandsson’s (2017) study of the police, our work shows how it is possible to co-produce an agricultural cooperative’s management. This compromise, to use Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) terminology, is fragile (Demers & Gond, 2020;Straub, 2018) and based on several factors. The first involves recognizing the plurality of justifying logics between both cooperative directors and managers. This reflects individuals’ ability to mobilize different magnitudes associated with specific worlds (Cloutier & Langley, 2013). As Gàlvez et al. (2020) pointed out, this research shows that individuals are not subject to social logics but are capable of mobilizing different values associated with different worlds. The actors’ capacity for agency is strong. If institutional logics are constraints limiting the actors’ room for maneuver, they can also be considered as resources to be mobilized.
The second factor involves an emphasis on “composite objects” (Boltanski & Th´evenot, 2006). This research established that composite objects could take the form of people with particular characteristics. In this respect, this research resonates with that of B´erub´e and Demers (2019) and Morgana (2019), who stress the importance of analyzing people to understand how agreement is constructed. This work specifies the contours of individual characteristics that influence creating consensus. Analyzing past professional trajectories and motivations to work in a cooperative showed that one dominant logic of justification coexists with another. This mix comprises a much more complex whole than the literature suggests. The cooperative directors referred mainly to community logic, but they also mobilized the commercial register. While the salaried managers were part of an industrial and commercial approach, they were also sensitive to communal justification. This hybridity between the two populations is therefore based on a common base they shared before meeting. This result is consistent with Oldenhof et al.’s (2014) in that it highlights managers’ importance in building an agreement, because their backgrounds allow them access to differing values from several worlds. By highlighting personal characteristics’ role in the emergence of “composite objects,” this research enriches the previous literature, which focused on constituting agreement or managing disagreement by enhancing our understanding of the strategies that actors developed (B´erub´e & Demers, 2019; Brandl et al., 2014; Dionne et al., 2018; Munzer, 2019). Our findings contribute to the literature on governance as well, by explaining how directors’ hybridity diminishes relational risks (Zhang, 2013) resulting from a lack of satisfactory cooperation between the board and management team.” (p. 9-10)

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GdL (3 avril 2024). Building an agreement in a farming cooperative governance: A Sociology of conventions approach. Économie des conventions. Consulté le 14 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/w5ms