The Nature of the Cooperative

These 10 collected articles by USDA Rural Development agricultural economist Charles Ling were originally printed in Rural Cooperatives magazine to examine the nature of cooperatives and their place in our free-market economy. “Essential Economic Roles of Farmer Cooperatives” (Published in the Nov./Dec. 2013 issue) summarizes the essence of this work. “What Cooperatives Are (and Aren’t)” (Nov./Dec. 2009) and “What Cooperatives Do” (March/April 2010), explain the economic structure of cooperatives and their role in the marketplace. Together, they examine the economic theory of cooperation as advanced, respectively, by Ivan V. Emelianoff and Edwin G. Nourse. These writings constitute a comprehensive framework for understanding cooperatives. The fourth article, “Dairy Cooperatives: What They Are and What They Do” (March/April 2011) looks at dairy cooperative practices to illustrate how well the theory fits reality, and vice versa. “How Co-ops Do It” (Nov./Dec. 2011) analyzes marketing operations of dairy cooperatives as a means of understanding the economics of co-op marketing. The sixth article, “The Nature of Cooperatives” (Jan./Feb. 2012), attempts to show how cooperatives relate to other market participants through their roles in transaction governance. The seventh article, “Capital Ideas” (May/June 2012), discusses how cooperatives raise equity capital. The eighth article, “The Many Faces of Cooperatives” (Nov./Dec. 2012), shows the variation on the uniqueness of the cooperative business model that constitutes a continuum onto which each type of cooperative falls and is whereby analyzed. The last two articles (Jan./Feb. and Mar./Apr. 2013) exemplify the analysis.