Study On Farmer Trust To Agricultural Cooperatives

Research on “San Nong” issues have been done thoroughly and a consensus is reachedthat cooperative transformation must be developed in order to better achieve their interests bythe farmers in Marker Economy. However, the situation of cooperative transformation is verybad. We found most cooperatives are “Shell Cooperatives” in a social survey to somecooperatives in Shaanxi and Shandong provinces. No substantive cooperative behavior ofmembers in the cooperatives is found. Trust situation in cooperatives is not optimistic at thepresent. Members note low levels of trust in managers and their cooperatives, so they do notcooperative substantively. Hence, study on the issues of trust in cooperatives can improvecooperative members’ participation, which is significant to the development of cooperatives.Research about trust in cooperatives is done in this paper under the situation of lowlevels of trust in cooperatives. First, this paper has reviewed relevant domestic and foreignresearches about trust, determined a definition of member’s trust to cooperative, divided trustinto three dimensions and designed an interpersonal trust scale. Then, on the basis oftheoretical analysis and research status a framework of empirical and a questionnaire aredesigned. And, some achievements are obtained after analyzing the date obtained by socialinvestigation. In the end, according to the achievements, some recommendations ofdevelopment of cooperatives are given. To obtain the date needed, a questionnaire survey ofsome cooperatives in Shaanxi and Shandong provinces is conducted, a telephone survey ofmanagers of some cooperatives in Shaanxi is conducted and some in-depth interview withsome members of some cooperatives in Shaanxi and Shandong provinces are conducted. Thispaper used SPSS for descriptive statistics analysis, the reliability and validity test, principalcomponent analysis, correlation analysis and linear regression analysis to analyze the dateobtained. Besides, Expectancy Theory in Management is used to analyze the status of farmercooperatives.The results show that: member’s trust to cooperative is closely related to expectancy thatcooperatives can increase their income and attitude that they believe cooperatives are workingfor farmers; member’s trust to cooperatives contains three dimensions which arecognition-based trust, affected-based trust and institution-based trust; cognition-based trustand institution-based trust are most closely related to member’s trust to cooperatives, both showing a positive linear correlation while the degree of correlation between affected-basedtrust and member’s trust to cooperative is significant but not very high; besides,cognition-based trust is most closely related to institution-based trust, showing a positivelinear correlation; member’s trust to cooperatives has a positive effect of cooperation, and theeffectiveness of cooperation can significantly improve member’s trust to cooperatives incooperatives with low-level trust while the improvement is little in cooperatives withhigh-level trust. And the research also found that member’s trust to cooperatives has asignificant but not high positive linear relationship with interpersonal trust between membersand managers, while there is no clear relationship between members, which shows there is asignificant difference between member’s trust to cooperatives and interpersonal trust incooperatives.