It takes a village: entrepreneurial bricolage in rural cooperative enterprise development

PurposeCooperative enterprises are uniquely different from all other for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises in that the onus of success does not lie on any one team leader, promoter or founder but on all members of the team equally and collectively. This paper attempted to investigate the key enablers of success in the unique context of cooperative enterprises.Design/methodology/approachUsing a combination of focus groups, in-depth interviews, observations and archival data, resulting in interactions with 744 members across 13 rural cooperative enterprises, we uncovered the enablers of team performance in a cooperative setting. The theory of entrepreneurial bricolage emerged as the most appropriate theoretical lens to interpret the findings.FindingsWe found empirical evidence to conclude that the emergence of an entrepreneurial bricolage mindset in rural cooperative enterprises acted as an enabler of collective success. On the other hand, the failed rural cooperatives exhibited the absence of the bricolage mindset.Research limitations/implicationsDespite the extent of data collected from a large number of individuals in each team, the number of teams studied is small. Further, most of the data comes from cooperative teams based in similar settings and with similar challenges. Extrapolating these findings in other organizational settings should be done only after replication.Practical implicationsA clear focus and commitment toward the collective accumulation and utilization of resources is imperative for the success of cooperative enterprise teams. Only those teams that actively confront resource scarcity and work toward addressing it are the ones that eventually perform well in cooperative structures.Originality/valueLarge-sized rural cooperative enterprises offer a unique setting to understand rural development. However, due to the challenges of first getting access to a cooperative enterprise context, then collecting data from a significant representation of the large team, and finally the inability to record the conversations due to issues pertaining to team psychological safety, limited attempts have been undertaken to understand team dynamics in such rural settings. The present study is among the first few to study large-sized cooperative teams and explore the enablers of their performance.