State and transforming institutional logics: the emergence and demise of Ottoman cooperatives as hybrid organizational forms, 1861–1888

Hybridity and conflicting logics—and what if not? A historical exploration of a XIV–XVI century social entity in Venice

“…Moreover, we find that these historical forms of "hybrid" organizing were not the endpoint of trajectories from commercial to social (Austin et al, 2006;Battilana et, al., 2012;Haigh & Hoffman, 2014), or from social to market (Reay & Hinnings, 2005;Christensen & Laegreid, 2011;Ebrahim et al, 2014): social care was organized in between different spheres from its birth. This echoes Soydemir and Erçek's (2020) finding of a counter trajectory going from a blurred form of market, State, and community cooperation to one of exclusive State jurisdiction in 19th-century Ottoman cooperatives. Therefore, we believe that a longer historical depth is useful in hybrid organizations research to revisit the very idea of the length, the shape, and the directions of the trajectories of hybridity.…”

“…A longer historical depth would render more variegated trajectories or even question the assumed direction of the mainstream trajectories of hybridity. Among the rare studies going in this direction, for example, Soydemir and Erçek (2020) showed how Ottoman agricultural credit cooperatives (1861-1888) represented unique hybrid forms blending state, community, and market logics into a single organizational configuration that diffused and then disappeared under the advent of a dominating state logic as the Ottoman society changed. Antonelli et al (2017) found a coexisting hybrid socialist and capitalist nature in a 19th-century Italian company and reconstructed how the company adopted a dual accounting system to respond to its dual goal of profit distribution to shareholders and workers.…”

The resurrection of earlier imprints post mortem: Explaining the Turkish agricultural cooperative movement with an imprinting theory lens, 1888–1937

“…As social immobility across different segments of the Ottoman society precluded a social movement and ethnoreligious fault lines among various communities significantly hampered cooperation, a local state governor established pseudo‐cooperative organizations in the rural Balkan villages. However, to achieve this end, he inevitably had to fuse state bureaucracy with community and market practices in the body of OMSs (Soydemir & Erçek, 2020). Despite their remarkable progress and invaluable services, escalating state intervention and irrepressible corruption and fraudulence eroded the solidarity among members and destroyed these cooperatives’ efficient credit distribution mechanisms in the 1880s (Quataert, 1975, p. 212).…”

“…The State's strong stamp on Ziraat Bank displayed similarities with its predecessor during the Ottoman times. Ottoman State also determined OMS members, as opposed to democratic and voluntary participation mechanisms, injected capital into OMSs by authorizing the plantation of state-owned lands and using OMSs' surplus to improve public infrastructure (Soydemir & Erçek, 2020).…”

“…First, they disproportionately focus on cooperatives where norms of democracy and solidarity have been entrenched in the founding and adolescence stages (Guttmann, 2021); yet, they seemed to remain silent about cooperatives that have emerged with top‐down processes, often embodied in norms like domination and self‐interest next to democracy and solidarity (Ingram & Simons, 2000; Varman & Chakrabarti, 2004; Veselov, 1994). As unusual as it may sound to envision a cooperative organization devoid of underlying values like democracy and self‐help, several scholars inform us about the existence of cooperatives, where either top‐down configurative approaches generated ill‐designed organizations at the outset (Robert, 1979; Wanyama et al., 2009) or strong state influence at later stages eroded these organizations’ substance (Soydemir & Erçek, 2020; Veselov, 1994; Yanbykh et al., 2019). Thus, we still have much to learn about the lifecycle patterns of such cooperatives built upon a hybrid normative infrastructure, incorporating and fusing potentially conflicting values like democracy, self‐help, state‐help, domination and self‐interest.…”