A co-operation is established when a group of people, sharing the same preferences and values, come together in order to satisfy a common need. The co-operative association should be democratic, governed and supervised by its members and open to everyone.

The purpose of this article is to, from our ideal type, study similarities and differences regarding the corporate governance of the consumers’ and the producers’ co-operative movement. The motive behind our choice of alignment is that the mechanisms of corporate governance often are described from the perspective of the joint-stock company, making it valuable and interesting to study these mechanisms from the co-operative point of view.

To fulfil the purpose we have been using the theories of principal-agency, transaction costs and stewardship and what we think are the distinguished characteristics of a co-operation; right of disposal, ideology, transaction specific investments and national restriction. The theories have then been applied to the mechanisms of corporate governance and on the basis of this, we have studied and analyzed empirical data, consisting partly of phone-interviews with respondents from the chosen co-operations, partly of secondary data concerning each co-operation.