The Emergence of GICL, the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership: Engaged Scholarship, Theory and Practice in Cooperative Education

Introduction By the 1950’s, the United States agriculture sector was populated with more than 10,000 marketing and multipurpose cooperatives – a new institutional form of organization born in the early 20th century. Enthusiasm and the intellectual attractiveness for this producer-owned and governed institutional form of collective action was beginning to wane. Agricultural economists, the primary source of research on the impact and competitive role of cooperatives in an increasingly globalized and industrialized food and fiber sector documented the consequences of increased rivalry in numerous subsectors and supply chains. However, their interests were usually limited to the mezzo level (market structure) and seldom expanded to the micro-analytic level of how strategic behavior of these patrons, rather than investor-owned entities, impacted farm decision making and subsequent governance behaviors of their user-owned cooperatives. Agricultural economists noted cooperatives’ positive impact in establishing countervailing market power in output and input markets, particularly at the first handler and increasingly in some of the upstream and downstream processing and manufacturing sectors. Many Nourse inspired, multi-purpose local cooperatives organized into vertically integrated supply chains, particularly in the capital-intensive input industries including petroleum, fertilizer, and chemicals. These multi-purpose federated regional cooperatives had also integrated into grain handling, terminal elevator storage, and commodity trading functions as they extended their reach into the global markets by beginning to acquire export facilities. Additionally, mid-century, Sapiro influenced, single commodity, centralized market-processing cooperatives were well known for their established brands supported by well-coordinated value chains. Meanwhile, academics were involved in debating the Helmberger-Philips discussion of whether a cooperative should be analyzed as an extension of the farm or a separate firm. For the more developed multipurpose and vertically integrated marketing cooperatives, scaling up was the challenge they faced, not starting up. The start-up cooperative role of ameliorating the negative consequences of imperfect markets and the accompanying market failures was accomplished already and cooperatives were now seen by non-cooperatives as rival firms. Consequently, for survival reasons, general managers and boards of directors were incentivized to behave in a more strategic manner. However, university researchers, particularly agricultural economists trained to study markets and market performance, paid little attention to the unique skills and traits and the accompanying tools needed to manage, lead, and govern these patron-owned and controlled entities