How Formal and Informal Hierarchies Shape Conflict within Cooperatives: A Field Experiment in Ghana
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an organizational form, cooperatives are increasingly being used throughout the world across different industries and sectors. While it has been suggested that various benefits can be derived from shared ownership, cooperatives are often characterized by conflict among members that, in turn, can lead to eventual failure of the cooperatives. Existing theory has suggested that the choice of formal control structure can play an important role in mitigating conflict, but a longstanding debate exists as to whether flat versus hierarchical control structures are more effective. To add further insight into this theoretical discussion, we conducted a field experiment involving 40 newly formed cooperatives in rural Ghana, which were randomly assigned to either a flat or hierarchical control structure. The quantitative results of our field experiment and subsequent qualitative data suggest that formal hierarchical control structures lead to lower levels of collective psychological ownership, which in turn result in higher levels of conflict compared to flat control structures within cooperatives. However, our results also suggest that the extent to which the choice of formal control structures influences conflict among cooperative members can be highly dependent on the absence or presence of an informal hierarchy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it