Social capital and member empowerment an empirical study among cooperatives in Kerala

Abstract

This research aims to determine the level of social capital formation among cooperative members in Kerala and tries to examine the role of influencing factors such as trust, social networks, norms and values, communication and information sharing and leadership and governance on the formation social capital. The study further attempted to determine the role of social capital in empowering and satisfying cooperative members and the mediating effect of member empowerment between social capital and member satisfaction. This study also identified the change in empowerment attained by cooperative members after becoming a member in a cooperative society. The present study is a descriptive and quantitative one based on primary and secondary data. The research considered the members of primary cooperatives in Kerala as the population. By employing a multi-stage sampling technique the research identified diary cooperatives, miscellaneous non-credit cooperative societies, credit and thrift societies, primary agricultural credit cooperatives, miscellaneous credit cooperative societies, educational and training cooperatives and consumer cooperatives as the proxies of cooperative sector and collected primary data from 756 members who are spread across three districts in Kerala using a structured questionnaire. The secondary sources of data were collected from various books, journals, reports and databases. Based on the requirements, the study employed a comprehensive set of statistical tools including frequency distributions, mean scores, standard deviation, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Kruskal Wallis H test, Mann-Whitney U test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank test and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyse the data. This study unravels that there is a high level of social capital generation among cooperative members in Kerala. The results clearly clarifies that the influencing factors has a significant role in the formation of social capital among cooperatives and the social capital so formed leads to member empowerment and member satisfaction. It is also evident from the findings that member empowerment partially mediate between social capital and member satisfaction. The investigation further reveals that there is a change in the level of empowerment of members. Therefore, this study affirms that, social capital is also a crucial determinant of cooperative and member development along with financial, human and physical capital.