The boundary-spanning role of a cooperative support organization: managing the paradox of stability and change in non-traditional organizations

This project provides an interpretation of how one cooperative support organization, the Nebraska Cooperative Council, discursively functions to help its constituent cooperatives consolidate resources in order to better intersect with organizations in a larger bureaucratic system. In analyzing qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, surveys, and organizational documents, we found the paradox of stability and change a revealing prism through which to make sense of participants' experiences. We work toward locating and describing how the Council, through its boundary-spanning activities, helps cooperatives manage the paradox of stability and change while protecting their core participatory ideologies. By providing networks of learning, promoting the legitimacy of cooperative forms of organizing, and protecting cooperatives' interests, the Council is an entity helping cooperatives to reconcile their internal requirements for democracy with the external demands of the marketplace.     

Book reviews

Takeshita, Masataka. Ibn ^cArabi's Theory of the Perfect Man and Its Place in the History of Islamic Thought. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1987 (Studia Culturae Islamicae, 32). iii + 182 pp.

Pryor, John. H. Geography, Technology and War : Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xvii +238pp.;£ 22.50 / US$ 39.50.

Baali, Fuad. Society, State and Urbanism : Ibn Khaldun's Sociological Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. 175 pp.; paper US$ 12.95, cloth US$ 34.50

Wilkinson, John (editor) with Hill, Joyce and Ryan, W.F., Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099–1185. London: The Hakluyt Society,1988. xi + 372pp., 24 maps and plans; £ 16.00.

Heine, Peter. Kulinarische Studien: Vntersuchungen zur Kochkunst im arabisch‐islamischen Mittelalter. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,1988. 137pp.; DM 68.