The Logic Of Cooperation In The Rural Society:a Study Of The Mechanism Of Farmers’Cooperation

In the view of the researchers, the Chinese farmers are not good at cooperation. However, is that real? In recent years, lots of forms of cooperation, such as farmers’ associations, farmers’ professional cooperative organizations, are growing rise and render the prosperity trend. Therefore how could the Chinese farmers get to cooperate? What’s the logic of co-operation of Chinese farmers in the Chinese rural society?On the basis of previous studies, this research chooses the farmers’ cooperation mechanism and the logic of cooperative action as the topic. We use literature study, depth interviews, community observation to explore the history and current situation of farmers’ cooperative and the rural social life in M Village, thus to explore the mechanism of farmers’ cooperative during the China’s rural social change.This paper tries to build a dynamic field of individual action including both internal and external mechanisms. That is, starting from the contact groups and actors, combining the sense of the real life, thus to insight the microscopic process of the historical period of Chinese farmers’ cooperative. Among them, the internal factors refer to the instinct of actors, and the projection of the external social environment on individuals; the external factors include not only the substance of the natural world and population structure, but also the norms and systems of group behavior which are not internalized by the actors.The study found that farmers’ cooperation benefited from both internal and external mechanisms. The trade-offs on the benefits and costs is the key to the decision of co-operation of farmers. The national forces, rural elite-led and social forces constitute the external mechanism of farmers’cooperative action. However, the internal mechanism, which includes the balance on benefits and costs of cooperation, as well as cognitive and cooperative spirit of cooperation, leads to the final decision whether to take cooperative action. Only when the total receipts of cooperation is greater than the total cost the cooperative action will be taken. On the contrary, the reason the uncooperative occurs is that the actors are unable to achieve the expected benefits of cooperation.