The Role of the Agricultural Council in Cooperative Governance

The evolution of the agricultural sector has required the adaptation of cooperatives in a context of globalisation. The emergence of cooperative groups formed by companies with cooperative status, upstream of production, and companies under private law, downstream of the commodity chains, is causing an identity crisis, the result of the rupture of the link with members. This work deals with the role of the agricultural council in strengthening the cooperative-member link in order to resolve the inherent identity crisis of agricultural cooperative groups. A qualitative method based on case studies of five French agricultural cooperative groups has allowed us to study the interaction of communities of a different nature through a new mode of knowledge management characterised by the interaction of functional groups and communities of practice: Mode 3. We show that agricultural advisers are at the centre of the advisory system and play the role of translators between the two cognitive communities.