Being Strong Together: Cooperative Farmer Organizing in Scandinavia

This chapter on the role of the cooperative farmer movement for the social and economic development in Denmark focuses on the cooperatives as a form of associating, hereby unfolding how these cooperatives gained momentum due to sociopolitical conflicts in the late 19th century and became embedded within a wider rural cultural and organizational network. This gave Danish economic development a distinctively associational characteristic as cooperative organizations consolidated on a national level. However, while cooperative businesses survived dramatic transformations by the 1960s concerning international economic pressures, shifts in national political interests leading to rural depopulation, increasing farm sizes, centralization, and the dissolution of rural culture and organizations, their former associational aspect was lost as their business aspect became disembedded from wider organizational and cultural networks.