Food coop as the height of the « consumer governmentality continuum »: discussion and avenues for research

This paper provides a discussion on the growing role of consumers in corporate governance. A typology of four consumerist figures is presented (the Opponent, the Responsible, the Co-creator and the Cooperator), where each type is considered as successive stage towards a complete and internalized takeover of the consumer. The special case of food cooperative of consumers (food coops) is then considered as the most evolved form of governance by and for consumers. Since very little marketing work has examined the particular case of food coops , the second objective was to provide various lines of research to better identify the essence and the potential associated with these structures. To do so, we present a research agenda structured through three parts: consumer-cooperator, relationships with environment and commercial performance.