ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to address one of the perhaps most central issues in the debate on rural cooperation, namely that of the socialisation of labour. By socialised labour we shall understand the joint sharing of rewards from jointly performed operations, i.e. the absence of a direct link between individual effort and individual rewards, and in pursuing our objective we shall, on the one hand, review some recent writings on the subject and, on the other, introduce empirical evidence from three countries where rural cooperation featuring socialised labour has been attempted on a wide scale. Our general purpose is to show that much of the formal work done has served to cloud the crucial issue, namely the quality aspect of socialised labour. Empirical evidence will be used to substantiate this claim.
