Prix du cas pédagogique RIODD-CCMP-EXCELIA 2023 : La Louve, supermarché coopératif et participatif

Abstract

Our case study focuses on La Louve, a cooperative and participative supermarket opened in 2016 in Paris. To be able to shop at the supermarket, people have to join the cooperative by buying shares and dedicating 3 hours of work each month. In return, members have access to quality food products at affordable prices and can participate in La Louve's decision-making. La Louve was inspired by a New York supermarket set up in 1973 (Park Slope Food Coop), and there are now more than thirty cooperative and participative supermarkets of this type in France.
Co-operatives have to meet a number of challenges simultaneously: staying financially healthy and competitive on price, promoting more sustainable food, catering for customers from all social backgrounds, and operating as democratically as possible.

The aim of the case is to show students how difficult it is for organisations to reconcile all these issues and maintain a form of hybridity over time. Compared with other cases or works on hybrid organisations that highlight the tension between social objectives and economic issues, the particularity of our case is that it approaches hybridity by incorporating the issue of participative governance and the tensions that this can generate in relation to social objectives. By the end of the case, students will also understand that organisations have several possible balances to try to reconcile all these objectives...