engleski

Causes of Croatian Cooperatives' Poor Performance

While in many European countries cooperative entrepreneurship manages to fulfil its economic and social functions successfully, in Croatia large majority of registered cooperatives struggle hard and frequently fail to accomplish in demanding market conditions. In 2015 only 19% of cooperatives accounted for 96% of cooperatives’ overall income. We trace causes of cooperatives’ poor performance from data obtained by our qualitative research project undertaken in the period September 2017 - March 2018 as well as from the Croatian Centre for Cooperative Entrepreneurship and other sources. Analysis reveals the identified causes may be contributed to historical and contemporary problems of sociocultural environment, institutional design and regulatory framework. These may further be divided into causes intrinsic to cooperatives, that may hence be modified by cooperative themselves, and external causes. As one of the major causes relates to cooperatives’ poor communication and cooperation practices, we propose a solution in the form of a model of sharing information and enhancing communication with the help of ICTs for the purpose of magnifying cooperatives' developmental prospects on national and international markets. We explain potential benefits of the model in relation to existing cooperative and cooperative-company hybrid networking models' philosophy and operational practices.

cooperatives, performance, qualitative research, model, networking

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