The Analysis On The Behaviors Of Member Participation In Farmer Specialized Cooperatives

Democratic control by members is one of the key characteristics that distinguish cooperatives from other types of business organizations. The democratic control in cooperatives can only be achieved by the active participation of members, which sequentially contributes to the normalization of cooperatives'operations. Due to competitions from the markets and membership heterogeneity, the behaviors of the members'participating in Chinese farmer specialized cooperatives may deviate from the traditional Western norms. However, theorists were not able to recognize this problem scientifically, nor were they able to explain it systematically, and as a result, they failed to provide any valuable guidance to practitioners regarding how to govern a cooperative effectively in the context of membership participation. In view of it, this dissertation attempts to analyze the membership participating behavior in Chinese farmer cooperatives, and examines the impacts of member participation on the members'benefits, members'satisfaction, as well as cooperatives'structure and performance.The main contents are:(1) The dissertation depicts membership heterogeneity and examines the motivations of farmers'joining a cooperative by applying a binary logistic model. The results show that farmers have various motivations and farmers characterized by service-orientation motivation tend to have larger production scale.(2) Based on a Tobit model and a multivariate probit model, the dissertation clarifies the roles and behaviors of member participation and further discusses the factors that influence member participation. Results show that members display heterogeneous levels of operational participation, financial participation and managerial participation. To be specific, members who are operationally and financially involved are more likely to participate in the cooperatives'management affairs.(3) The dissertation identifies the impact of member participation on members' economic benefits and satisfaction by path analysis method. The results indicate that different types of participating behaviors have different influences on the effects of member participation in terms of members'benefits and satisfaction.(4) The dissertation reports the features of cooperatives'ownership structure, patronage, and governance structure, and investigates the impacts of membership on the above mentioned features by descriptive statistical tests. The results show that member participation in terms of finance, business and management is unbalanced. Core members, as a minority group, participate in a more active way.(5) The dissertation introduces a new measurement of cooperatives'performance and examines its rationality. Besides, the paper evaluates the possible impacts of cooperatives'ownership structure, patronage, and governance structure on the performance by a multivariate regression model. The results highlight that equally distributed ownership structure and patronage structure in terms of members' financial and operational participations are not beneficial to the improvement of the cooperatives'performance. However, the governance with wide membership involvement may have a positive effect on the cooperatives'performance.Some managerial suggestions of this study are summarized. (1) Firstly, to set up rational entrance requirements to guarantee voluntary membership and to serve heterogeneous members with differentiated service strategies. (2) Secondly, to encourage all the members to hold shares in the cooperatives and in the meantime set the upper share limit for the core members such as the director. (3) Thirdly, to distribute profit based on both patronage and shares according to the Law and to serve members and non-members differently. (4) To encourage members to participate in the management of cooperatives and contribute to the management via financial participation and operational participation. (5) To pay adequate attention to members' non-economic expectation and needs. (6) The government should prevent the core members from excluding the managerial involvement of common members by institutionalized supervision and evaluation mechanism. (7) The government should make great efforts to solve problems regarding member participation through adjusting relevant laws and regulations. Compared with the existing domestic literature, the possible innovations of this dissertation include three aspects:(1) About the research perspective, the paper initiates a research perspective in which the concept of member participation is innovatively divided into three dimensions, i.e. financial participation, operational participation, and managerial participation. Additionally, the mechanism of member participation is identified as well. (2) Regarding the research theory, the dissertation enriches and expands the theory on participation. To be specific, the democratic participation theory in political science area and the staff participation theory in management area are innovatively applied in the research of cooperative organization. The research provides the development and application of the participation theory in the Chinese context and offers more opportunities to enrich the cooperative theoretic system in the Chinese context. (3) About the research methodology, the paper enriches the evaluation method of cooperatives'performance. The dissertation is a pioneer in introducing the perceptual measurement method which is generally used to study the performance of Chinese enterprises in the field of management. It is a good and innovative attempt to apply it in the research on farmer cooperatives.