Social Capital in Capitalistic Firms and in Cooperative Firms: a Comparison

The economic and theoretical literature, in addition to some empirical studies, have widely investigated issues like the influence of social interaction and social capital on productivity as a whole and, more specifically, on labour productivity and on the diffusion of knowledge and innovation. The aim of this paper is to identify what kind of production organizations promotes the accumulation of social capital, that is a good working climate. In this paper, we compare two organizational models of firms, the capitalistic and the cooperative (LMF) ones, to determine which of them favours this phenomenon due to the worker’s choice for cooperative effort. We show that workers of cooperative firms have higher incentives in exerting cooperative efforts and, therefore, we conclude that the cooperative firm is the best type of enterprise in transforming cooperative choices of workers into structural characteristics of organizations which promote the accumulation of social capital.