Análise das contribuições do ambiente institucional formal e do capital social da Cooperativa de Apicultores de Tucano/BA (COOAPIT) para o seu estabelecimento no mercado de mel

Abstract

In this research, the contributions of the institutional environment and the social capital of a solidarity cooperative to its establishment in the honey market were jointly analyzed in order to discover the determining factors. The theoretical analysis used the formal aspects of neoinstitutional theory organized according to the categories technology, capital, organizational development and marketing network, referring to institutions and organizations in the institutional environment. The informal aspects were analyzed from the behavioral elements of the social capital theory expressed in the categories of trust and reciprocity by Durston (2002) and network of relationships and participation according to Putnam (1996). The approach was qualitative and had as a data collection instrument semi-structured interviews with ten members of a honey production solidarity cooperative. The method of analysis used was content analysis in conjunction with the categorical analysis technique performed from the breakdown and classification of respondents' responses into categories that allowed interpretations and inferences (BARDIN, 2016). As a result, the beekeepers interviewed pointed out the physical structures financed by the State and the internal and external relations established by the cooperative members as fundamental for their establishment in the honey market. The theoretical contribution of this work is given by the joint analysis of the contributions of the formal institutional environment and the behavioral elements of the social capital of a collective solidarity organization in order to explain its establishment as a competing organization in a given market. Future studies can be carried out to analyze other collective solidarity organizations in their institutional environments in order to test the joint application of the theoretical contents of the neoinstitutional and social capital theories.