Playing the Game or Changing the Game? Meso-Level Organizing and Depoliticization of the Food Co-Op Form

This study provides an analysis of the U.S. food co-op field’s response to massive changes in its market and movement environments. When the “organic” food category became mainstreamed by way of a USDA label suitable to corporate scale, food co-op managers focused on the challenge of scale and built a new organization to leverage operational volume. This research investigates three structural as well as discursive dimensions of this field-level response. Chapter 3 focuses on how a new meta-organization mediates sectoral isomorphic pressures to its member co-ops by facilitating selective scaling in the operational realm, not in the cooperative form realm. The chapter shows that “how you scale is what you scale.” It thus highlights the structural mechanisms at play in field-level cooperation among cooperatives. Chapter 4 zooms in to the role of managers as change agents in food co-ops’ adaptation processes in the past decades. General managers have facilitated the structural decentering of membership and an increasing market orientation, both at organizational level and at field level, where members are absent from field strategy. This chapter adds a power lens to the analysis, highlighting the shifting agency of groups within food co-ops and the field. Chapter 5 inquires into the role of movements and the degree of politicization of the organizational form in the field. Field leadership’s market orientation as well as an adoption of nonprofit repertoires has “settled” contestation to some degree, and some conditions facilitating collectivist-democratic organizing are underdeveloped. This chapter sheds light on discursive as well as structural elements in the field that inform strategy and limit reflexive agency. To summarize, managerialism affects food co-ops at different levels: at the organizational level, managerial power and weak democratic governance produce a democratic deficit in favor of market orientation. At the field level, managerial collective action has produced infrastructure, a new meta-cooperative for generating volume for scaling, but food co-op membership remains external to field level organizing. In addition, no field-wide association represents food co-ops in their entirety as cooperatives. Many food co-ops organized by a manager-led meta-cooperative are devoting much of their energy to coping with market pressures, rather than with developing cooperative economics. This study is grounded in nested sets of scholarship on organizational form in general, on alternative and collectivist-democratic organizations, and on cooperatives as cases of such collectivist-democratic organizational forms. At the analytic level of general organization studies, this work contributes to our understanding of the complexity of adaptation to institutional environments for “alternative” organizations. The case study presented here highlights the significance of meso-level cooperation for alternative organizations in mediating pressures, and the mixed outcomes of such organizing. This study contributes to scholarship on collectivist-democratic organizations as cases of prefigurative alternative organizations by working out conditions facilitating (or undermining) collectivist-democratic organizing at field level. At the most specific level of analysis, the study of cooperatives, this research contributes insights on the role of membership with regard to the economic basis of cooperatives. It also finds that besides pressures from “hostile” institutional environments, cooperative governance repertoires can also become undermined by “friendly fire” through the adoption of repertoires from the nonprofit field.