ABSTRACT
The basic unit of analysis used here includes the cooperative’s two economic management levels as well as the household. These three are treated as a triad called, for want of a better term, a “collectivity.” This unit is understood conceptually to be quite different from the cooperative. The basic concept used to understand interrelationships within the collectivity among these three levels is that of dominance, in the sense of one level’s ability to determine the outcome of activities carried out by the other(s). Use of this concept allows consideration of the great variety of factors, especially the strictly noneconomic, that influenced economic decisions. The term is used to illustrate certain systematic patterns of relations among the three levels of the collectivity. These different patterns accompanied systematic variation in the development of production and surplus mobilization, and they tended to produce similar outcomes despite having different origins.
