Investigating difficulties and failure in early-stage rural cooperatives through a social capital lens
研究了早期阶段农村合作社在设立和运营中遇到的困难及失败原因，发现负面社会资本、管理营销弱点和制度条件等因素阻碍其发展，对合作社理论和政策有参考价值。
Rural cooperatives are assumed to contribute to economic development, regeneration, service delivery and local democracy. This paper examines the problems of setting up early-stage rural cooperatives, the difficulties experienced by them, and antecedents of their failure by complementing extant research with an empirical study of existing and recently failed early-stage Welsh cooperatives. Factors inhibiting early-stage rural cooperative growth and survival encompass various aspects of negative and antithetical social capital, exacerbated by management and marketing weaknesses, as well as regional and national institutional conditions. Such factors are relevant to theory development, cooperative management practice and public sector policy, and are theorised from rural cooperation, social capital and rural development perspectives.