ABSTRACT
The need to face growing financial problems and to shift from a pattern of internal solidarity to a more extended and community-oriented one, brought about the development of the multi-stakeholder cooperative. Bringing big and small cooperatives and other similar organisations under the common roof of the social economy was an attempt to provide a solution. Cooperatives have a number of intrinsic potentials that confer on them a clear edge over other organisational solutions. Economic embeddedness is what distinguishes cooperatives from general deontological ethics and the ‘new communitarianism’ in that they combine the economic in its entrepreneurial role and the social in its defining-delimiting role in the same organisational framework. The historical socio-economic duality remains the major characteristic of the cooperative, at the same time an asset and a liability. Casting doubts on the classical socio-economic design of the cooperative can be interpreted as a heresy by those concerned with the subject.
