Tuesday 16th March 2010 at 10 AM
in Sala Multimediale Gruppo Spes - Via Borsieri, 7 - Trento
with
Francesca Gagliardi* from University of Hertfordshire
The research offers a critical analysis of the economic theory of the cooperative firm and empirical evidence, and contends that a novel interpretative framework is needed in order to reconcile the difference between mainstream theory, on the one hand, and institutionalist accounts and extant empirical evidence, on the other. It is argued that such a framework is provided by the institutional complementarity approach. This has recently been proposed in the literature dealing with the importance of institutions in the economy and varieties of capitalism, in order to capture a part of the stylised facts concerning the evolution of contemporary capitalism. By incorporating contexts and history into the analysis of cooperative firms, the institutional complementarity approach provides a dynamic analytical framework that enables overcoming the flaws of mainstream accounts. These suffer from severe methodological lacunae. Beside the limitations of the formal analysis, the main problem with the traditional economic analysis of cooperative firms is to have treated the environment as fixed. In other words, the analysis is insensitive to contexts. There is instead widespread anecdotal evidence suggesting that the development of economic democracy requires a favourable climate and the creation of complementary organisations. That is, organisations that support the creation and development of cooperative firms; coordinate their activities; help integrate them into a group or sector, and provide finance. The present research shows that incorporating institutional complementarities in the economic analysis of the cooperative firm enables making sense of the otherwise puzzling divergence characterising theoretical and empirical debates.
* Francesca Gagliardi is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire. Her research aims to explore ways in which insights from institutional and evolutionary economics can help our understanding of economic performance. Francesca’s research projects include the investigation of the role of institutional complementarities in firm development.
Francesca is member of the Group for Research into Organisational Evolution (GROE), founded within the University of Hertfordshire to undertake empirical and theoretical research into the evolution of firms and industries, building on ideas from several disciplines and sub-disciplines, including evolutionary economics, institutional economics and organizational ecology.
