“We do not want to survive; we want to thrive.”: Japanese agricultural cooperative’s seven decades of overcoming degeneration

Abstract

Abstract Along its development trajectory, a cooperative reaches a stage when market circumstances force it to restructure into a corporate entity. While neoclassical theory regards this as an advancement, political economy theory views it as ‘degeneration’ because the cooperative has become what it initially sought to defy. Several strands of literature show how some cooperatives either disbanded because they could not restructure into corporations or survived by changing into private share-owned firms. However, there have been minimal theoretical explanations for those cooperatives that have managed to overcome degeneration. This paper analyzes the Japanese Agricultural Cooperative (JA) and argues that a more robust, assertive, and organized national association enabled it to resist degeneration. Data was collected through a case study of JA Green Omi (Shiga prefecture) using a mixed methodology approach. The results indicate that the stability of the cooperative’s capital structure, the nature of self-reform, and internal contradictions were as strong as only allowed by the stability of the national cooperative association. Thus, to overcome degeneration, developing cooperatives must bolster the interplay between local and national associations in addition to intra-cooperative tinkering and restructuring.