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Originally published in 1993, this is a study of agricultural co-operatives. The farming structure in transition countries has shifted from dominance of large corporate farms to family smallholdings. Smallholders everywhere experience difficulties with access to market services, including sale of products, purchase of inputs, and acquisition of machinery; they suffer from credit shortages and have limited access to information and advisory services. The barriers to market access prevent smallholders from fully exploiting their inherent productivity advantages. Best-practice world experience highlights farmers' service cooperatives, created by grassroots users, as the most effective way of improving the market access of small farmers. Service cooperatives also help smallholders overcome market failures, when private business entrepreneurs are unwilling to provide services in areas that they judge unprofitable or unfairly exploit users through monopolistic practices. These difficulties and market failures are prominent in transition countries and scholars accordingly expected rapid development of agricultural service cooperatives in response to smallholder needs. The present volume explores gaps between expectations and reality.
This book is the result of several years of research activity on the topic of how to better link farmers, processors and retailers with each other in order to ensure and improve the supply of food products which meet consumer needs and wants. The book is structured in three parts. Starting with an overview regarding main developments in the agri-food sector with relevance for chain relationships (chapter 1), Part I is mainly concerned with providing the theoretical foundations for analysing agrifood chain relations (chapters 2, 3 and 4). Building on this conceptual basis, the second part presents in-depth empirical evidence for different countries, food chains and chain stages regarding the issues of trust and sustainable relationships in agri-food chains (chapters 5 to 14). The red meat industry (beef and pigmeat) is the focus of chapters 5, 7 and 9. Cereals (bread and malting barley) are analysed in chapters 5, 7, 8, 10 and 13. Horticultural products (fresh produce and wine) are investigated in chapters 6, 12 and 14. Regionally, the studies cover Europe, North America (the USA), China, Australia and the Philippines. While most studies were conducted in developed markets, chapters 6 and 12 look at the particularities of transition or developing economies. As to individual agri-food chain stakeholders, a number of chapters (chapters 5 to 12, 14 and 15) offer and discuss separate findings for farmers, food processors or retailers. Based on the theoretical and empirical findings in the first two parts of the book, recommendations for agribusiness managers (chapter 15) and policy-makers (chapter 16) are described in the third part. Chapter 17 discusses avenues for future research.
Synthesizes the empirical literature on organizationalstructuring to answer the question of how organizations structure themselves --how they resolve needed coordination and division of labor. Organizationalstructuring is defined as the sum total of the ways in which an organizationdivides and coordinates its labor into distinct tasks. Further analysis of theresearch literature is neededin order to builda conceptualframework that will fill in the significant gap left by not connecting adescription of structure to its context: how an organization actuallyfunctions. The results of the synthesis are five basic configurations (the SimpleStructure, the Machine Bureaucracy, the Professional Bureaucracy, theDivisionalized Form, and the Adhocracy) that serve as the fundamental elementsof structure in an organization. Five basic parts of the contemporaryorganization (the operating core, the strategic apex, the middle line, thetechnostructure, and the support staff), and five theories of how it functions(i.e., as a system characterized by formal authority, regulated flows, informalcommunication, work constellations, and ad hoc decision processes) aretheorized. Organizations function in complex and varying ways, due to differing flows -including flows of authority, work material, information, and decisionprocesses. These flows depend on the age, size, and environment of theorganization; additionally, technology plays a key role because of itsimportance in structuring the operating core. Finally, design parameters aredescribed - based on the above five basic parts and five theories - that areused as a means of coordination and division of labor in designingorganizational structures, in order to establish stable patterns of behavior.(CJC).