Social capital, as an approximation to the culture of cooperation existing in a territory, is a very broad concept (Arando et al., 2012) that includes several dimensions: mutual trust between people, effective norms of affection and trust, as well as the social networks existing in the region (Colleman, 1988, Putnam, 2000, Marcuello et al., 2007).
An incipient research line is addressing the importance of considering organizational diversity in the analysis of the relationship between social capital and business. I.e., some papers are also beginning to analyze the characteristics of the different typologies of organizations and how these are particularly related to the dynamics of social capital (Bauer et al., 2012, Sabatini et al., 2014). As Borzaga and Sforzi (2014) point out, although several papers have focused on analyzing the role of non-profit organizations, research on other similar organizations as cooperatives is still limited. Assuming the close links between the nature of cooperatives and social capital (Valentinov, 2004), it seems therefore really important to go deeper into this topic.
The general objective of this paper is to examine the regional determinants that affect the creation of cooperatives and, in particular, to study the link between social capital and cooperative entrepreneurship at the regional level.
Data have been obtained from the Ministry of Employment and Social Security for the number of active and constituted cooperative societies, and from several sources in the case of Social Capital, in order to obtain variables that approximate the level of social capital in a region: the Valencian Institute of Economic Research - IVIE for the synthetic index of social capital, and from the Home Department for number of associations and electoral participation.
We use the methodology of the Granger causality test (1969). It seeks to determine which of two variables marks the path followed by the other, based on the idea that the cause cannot appear before the effect. This test has been widely used in numerous empirical studies in specialized economic literature (Shan, 2005; Tervo, 2009).
This paper uses a comparative perspective, analyzing the relation of social capital in worker cooperatives, in all types of cooperatives, and in the commercial businesses. With this, we try to determine if the cooperative societies create social capital, and if the impact of it is higher than in commercial businesses. Taking into account the existing literature, this perspective has been scarcely used in research to date. For that reason, we consider that given the relevance and interest it is opportune to expand the knowledge of the keys of the cooperative entrepreneurship.
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3. Governance, employment and human resource management
