Technical Assistance, Solution for the Identity Crisis of the Agricultural Cooperatives
The emergence of cooperative groups created by companies with a co operative status, upstream production, and private companies, downstream, resulted in the rupture of their relationship with their members (Vargas Prieto, 2014) This paper addresses the role of the agricultural extension in strengthening the co operatives/members' relation in order to resolve the inherent identity crisis of such groups. A qualitative method based on the case study of five groups allowed us to study the interactions between communities through a new mode of knowledge management characterized by the interaction between functional groups and communities of practice: the Model 3 (Vargas Prieto, 2015) We show that agricultural advisors act as translators between the two cognitive communities and this facilitates the resolution of the identity crisis of agricultural cooperatives