The Changing Values of the Cooperative and Its Business Focus

Abstract

This paper examines the range of objectives open to cooperative businesses and assesses the change in organizational focus over time through the semantic analysis of historical annual reports of seven agricultural cooperative businesses. The findings indicated that, although there was a positive relationship between business age and increasing corporate, as opposed to member, orientation, this phenomenon is not inevitable for all organizations. The results also offered evidence that some of the change in business focus is generated by the internal dynamics of the business rather than from external factors such as competition and economic trends. Copyright 1997, Oxford University Press.