ABSTRACT
The very reason for the persistence of the ‘squaring the circle’ difficulty lies in the very nature of the economic prevailing system and the ensuing ‘double nature’ of the cooperative. The symbolic values at the basis of cooperatives are expected to inform both the association-ends and the enterprise-means sides of the organisation. A cooperative cannot play the economic game using the same tools as its purported adversary. Three scenarios are offered in an attempt to forecast possible ways of coping with the socio-economic tension and the paradox of incongruity in the cooperatives: status quo; isomorphism; and radical change. The tendency is to privilege categories of the imaginary register as self-interest, power relations and economic disembeddedness. The all-too-frequent incongruity between the categories of thought that enunciate the ends and the means, respectively symbolic and imaginary. The logic of self-interest is the dominant one and as such it has to be underpinned by the ‘hard’ categories of the imaginary.
