Participation behavior, effect and Action Machine of members of Farmers' specialized Cooperatives

I. asking questions

In theory, the development of farmers' professional cooperatives is beneficial to improve the degree of farmers' organization, protect farmers' interests and enhance the comprehensive efficiency of agriculture. However, in order to truly protect and promote the interests of farmers through cooperatives, we need to rely on the active participation of peasant members to promote the normal production and management activities of cooperatives. The participation behavior of members of farmers' professional cooperatives includes three dimensions: business participation, capital participation and management participation. Members play the roles of beneficiary, owner and manager respectively. Among them, the business and capital participation of members can make members obtain good economic benefits, but if the participation behavior of ordinary members is limited to this, the economic benefits obtained by members relying on cooperatives may be unstable and may be occupied by core members at any time. For example, core members such as the board of supervisors of cooperatives can share out most or even all of the surplus of cooperatives according to share capital by increasing their holdings of cooperative shares. Therefore, it is necessary for cooperative members to safeguard their legitimate benefits by participating in the general meeting of members (representatives), voting for members of the supervisory board of cooperatives, and deciding on major investment projects of cooperatives. Member management participation is also the essential difference between cooperatives and other types of enterprise organizations, such as companies, but management participation does not necessarily bring direct economic benefits to members. For China, which is still in the early stage of the development of farmers' professional cooperatives, the knowledge of cooperatives is not universal, and farmers lack democratic practice, members pay more attention to the direct acquisition of economic benefits. they do not care much about the major decisions of cooperatives and the future development of cooperatives. This may affect the participation behavior of members, and then affect their income acquisition and satisfaction in cooperatives.

This paper attempts to explore the influence of members' capital, business and management participation behavior on members' income and member satisfaction, and empirically analyze its mechanism through sample analysis. in order to answer the impact of members' participation behavior on members' income and satisfaction.

Second, the effect of members' participation and research hypotheses

In the field of organizational behavior, scholars choose subjective and objective indicators such as employee satisfaction, job (task) performance and organizational citizenship behavior as organizational effect variables when studying organizational justice, employee psychological contract and other issues. the index measurement of cooperative members' participation effect also includes the economic benefit index of objective dimension, the utility and feeling index of subjective dimension.

(I) income from members

Members will get certain benefits in the process of participating in farmers' professional cooperatives, which is the result of members' participation, including economic and non-economic dimensions. For example, by participating in cooperatives, many women increase their self-confidence, improve their work skills, improve their social status at home, reduce disputes with their neighbors, and increase their behavior of mutual assistance. these are typical manifestations of non-economic benefits that are difficult to measure by monetization. The member income referred to in this paper will be limited to the economic income that can be measured by monetization, that is, the net income of agricultural production and operation brought by farmers through participation in cooperatives. It includes the net income of members from the sale of agricultural products through cooperatives, as well as share dividends and rebate income based on benefits received by members from cooperatives. Furthermore, this paper puts forward

Hypothesis 1: members' income will be positively affected by their capital, business and management participation behavior, and compared with members' management participation behavior, members' capital participation and business participation will significantly affect members' income.

(2) members' satisfaction

In the process of participating in cooperative affairs, members of farmers' professional cooperatives will gradually form their cognition and evaluation of cooperatives, especially their own judgment on whether cooperatives meet their own expected goals (functions). Form the problem of member satisfaction. However, different from previous studies in which some scholars regard it as a performance indicator at the cooperative organization level, this paper will consider the member satisfaction variable at the member level. In previous studies, Guo Hongdong, Yuan Luming and Lin Di have found that member income has a positive impact on member satisfaction, and it is also common to study employee participation and satisfaction from the perspective of management participation. Furthermore, this paper puts forward

Hypothesis 2: member satisfaction is affected not only by the benefits obtained from cooperatives, but also by members' management participation behavior, and the impact of members' management participation on members' satisfaction is greater than its impact on members' income.

Third, path analysis

In order to test the complex relationship of the influence of members' capital participation, business participation and management participation on members' income and member satisfaction, according to the previous research experience of theorists, this paper attempts to introduce the structural equation model method to analyze the action mechanism of multiple variables. The structural equation modeling method has the advantages of allowing multiple endogenous variables to be processed at the same time, allowing variables to have measurement errors, and allowing variables to be composed of multiple observation index variables (that is, allowing variables to be latent variables that cannot be measured directly). Allows the use of more flexible measurement models, allows the design of complex variable relation models and other advantages. Since the 1970s, the method and software of structural equation model have been developed rapidly. in recent years, structural equation model has also been applied and popularized in the research of farmers' professional cooperatives.

The model to be applied in this paper is an important part of the structural equation model-path analysis. Path analysis is composed of the causal relationship of a set of linear system equations between observable variables. Its main purpose is to test whether there is a causal relationship between variables and the direct and indirect effects between variables. The particularity of path analysis is that it has only observed variables but no potential variables.

(1) Analytical model

According to the previous research hypothesis, this paper proposes a hypothetical model of path analysis between variables shown in figure 1, which can be expressed by the following four sets of linear equations:

Among them, it represents a variable, which can be used as either an independent variable or a dependent variable in the above equations. It represents the path coefficient. In order to distinguish different path coefficients, the dependent variable subscript of the path is generally used as the first subscript of the path coefficient, and the independent variable subscript of the path is used as the second subscript of the path coefficient. In addition, it represents the residual term of the equation.

In this paper, the descriptive statistics and correlation analysis of the samples are carried out by using the SPSS14.0 software, and the path analysis and test of the proposed hypothesis model is carried out by the structural equation modeling software AMOS 6.0.To test whether the hypothesis is supported by the sample data.

(2) description of samples and variables

The data used in the empirical analysis came from the field survey of farmers' professional cooperatives and their members in Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces in 2009, in which the sample members of cooperatives basically adopted the method of simple random sampling. a total of 357 original questionnaire data were obtained, after excluding the member questionnaire of flower and seedling cooperatives and a small number of member questionnaires with distorted or incomplete key index data. In this paper, a total of 309 questionnaires are used in the empirical analysis. In order to verify the path analysis hypothesis, this paper compiles the member capital, business, management participation behavior, member income and member satisfaction variables of 309 member sample data as multi-classified ordered variables.