Abstract
This chapter explores the emergence of the Dutch citizen-led health-care cooperative Texel Samen Beter (TSB). TSB was started in 2014 by a group of concerned citizens on the island of Texel, the Netherlands, to improve health-care services. Specifically, the chapter traces how the TSB board engaged in a number of activities to give meaning to the cooperative’s emergent identity. Moving from an abstract idea to having an impact on the health-care sector, to actually ‘becoming’ a fully functioning cooperative, proved to be a challenging endeavor. Not only did the cooperative struggle with internal ambiguity and a lack of consensus about what TSB should stand for but external actors also tried to take advantage of the uncertain institutional landscape and to impose their own ideas on the budding cooperative. Ultimately, the chapter shows that, through important decisions, communications and activities, the TSB board has managed to navigate the institutional complexity it faced and come to establish itself as a legitimate actor in the Dutch health-care sector. The wider implications of the story of TSB speak to the importance of understanding the process by which an identity emerges, which is of particular relevance to hybrid organizations like cooperatives.
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Notes
- 1.
Many of the citizen-led initiatives in the Netherlands combine activities and services in the domains of health care and housing, for example, projects to build intergenerational living complexes that include care services. As such, the 320 registered initiatives mentioned here include cooperatives that combine health care and housing.
- 2.
Specifically, from November 2015 until January 2017, one of the authors spent two to three days a week on the island and participated in and observed activities and meetings organized by the cooperative, as well as events, meetings or activities relevant to the wider context (e.g., joining coffee mornings in the care home for the elderly, playing ruby or observing an art class for seniors with dementia). Additional data sources include interviews, informal conversations, focus groups, survey data, newspaper articles, newsletters, information from websites, email exchanges and minutes from board meetings. Between January 2017 and January 2018, both authors have had continued email exchanges and made additional visits to the island, though not as intensively as during the study period noted.
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Werner, M.D., Jellema, S.F. (2019). ‘Becoming a co-operative?’: Emergent Identity and Governance Struggles in the Context of Institutional Ambiguity in a Citizen-Led Health-Care Cooperative. In: Alexius, S., Furusten, S. (eds) Managing Hybrid Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95486-8_12
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