ABSTRACT
The agencies’ insistence on the cooperative component brought about a state of insensitivity to the settlers’ culture and needs. A whole community may became a ‘stakeholder’ of a cooperative by playing a major role in its creation and support and by seeing the cooperative as an expression of local socio-economic and cultural values. The very nature of the cooperatives under discussion rallies a variety of stakeholders under the same symbolic field of solidarity and commitment to a common cause. The director of the cooperative worked for practical solutions enabling it to go hand in hand with the current market competition and never saw a contradiction between a cooperative system and economic efficiency. The cooperative displays a high involvement in educational and cultural activities in the community and the surrounding area, yet has no formal educational programmes in the cooperative itself. Cooperatives emerge in order to reduce transaction costs through pooling of resources.
