Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

The article objective is to identify methodological foundations for studying cooperative forms of the socio-economic activity. Since the late 1980s, new and deeper approaches have been formed, and the cooperative theme has been integrated into the context of more general problems of the Russian history - modernization, alternative ways of socio-economic development, and the Russian mentality specifics. The author considers the traditions of defining the essence of cooperation in frames of formation, modernization, and civilizational paradigms. Activating the civilizational approach since the second half of the XIX century has advanced studying socio-cultural factors that contributed to the social capital accumulation and promoted association. Viewed from this perspective, cooperation appears as a «goal-rational» type of a social action, which results in forming social ties between individuals, creating associations and stable social institutions. For the traditional Russian society, where the «value-oriented» type of social action prevailed and the ability to associate was poorly developed, cooperative forms were exo-innovation. Organically fitting into the modernization processes, cooperation with its inherent functions of adaptation and integration contributed to socialization of economy, overcoming the society’s socio-cultural split, accumulating social capital, expanding the sphere of non-state civil activities, becoming the effective factor of the Russian modernization. The prospects for studying cooperation are related to the interpretation of its essence and cooperative experience in the context of ideas about the diffusion of exo-innovations in the modernization course, «actor» approach, «civil society» concept, which allow inscribing the history of the cooperative movement into the complex conditions of modernization process.