Bringing Institutional Structures Back:Reciprocal Trust and Its Institutional Foundations in special-ized farmers'cooperatives
Based on Karl Polanyi's concept of embeddedness,economic sociology has long focused on the socio-cultural foundations of rational economic behavior.Particularly,Granovetter's concept of social network ties and its implications of reciprocity and trust as cultural capital have become crucial for analyzing the social conditions and foundations of capital in rural areas,market transactions,and cooperative ventures.However,rural Chinese society is no longer the stable network of familiar relationships it once was;its social ties and cultural traditions are undergoing a transformation towards individualization,rationalization,and instrumentalization.To address the transient and speculative risks of interpersonal relationships in a mobile society,it is necessary to reintegrate informal personal relationships into formal institutional structures and frameworks.This study,using the exam-ple of the M specialized farmers'cooperative,demonstrates the elite status of its founders and the vulnerability of the cooperative group.It illustrates how these groups use institutional structural relationships to mitigate the vulnerability of interpersonal relationships within cooperative operations.It underscores the fact that traditional local resources struggle to independently facilitate cooperation in the face of modernization and stresses the need to balance the relationship between informal personal ties and formal institutional structures.Emphasizing sole-ly on the formal institutional operation of social foundations is not advisable.
cooperative mechanismsocial capitalinformal personal relationshipsinstitutional embedding