COMMERCIALIZATION PERFORMANCE 67
to identify who the decisionmakers are for a series of commonly taken deci- sions on 1. the inclusion of new members, 2. the expulsion of existing members, 3. the start of a new activity in the cooperative, 4. the collaboration with a new partner, 5. the amount of dividends to be distributed, 6. the investment in new materials or infrastructure, 7. the amount of output to buy, 8. the amount of output to sell, 9. the amount of output to store,
10. the amount of input to buy, 11. the amount of input to sell, 12. the time to sell, 13. the price given to members for their outputs, 14. the person or organization to buy input from, 15. the person or organization to sell output to, and 16. the market on which to sell.
For each decision, we recorded whether all members participated in the decision process (for example, through a vote in the general assembly) or the decision was left to a restricted number of individuals (such as the management committee or the president). We then computed participation indicators as the percentage of decisions that were open to all members. Three indicators are specifically considered: a general indicator taking all decisions into account, an indicator limited to general organizational deci- sions (decisions 1–6 above), and an indicator limited to technical decisions (decisions 7–16).
Our results show that on average 19 percent of all decisions are open to all members. For general organizational decisions, the average reaches 38 percent, compared to only 8 percent for technical decisions. The low level of participation in technical decisions is to be expected. More surprising, how- ever, is the low level of participation in general decisions. More information can be drawn from the distributions of these variables, as shown in Figure 5.1. Clearly, in the vast majority of cooperatives, most—if not all—technical decisions are taken by the management committee. In contrast, the distribu- tion of the indicator for general decisions is clearly bimodal: some coopera- tives are more or less fully participatory, whereas others are almost fully nonparticipatory. We classify the former as high-participation and the latter as low-participation organizations.
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