For decades, the cooperative enterprise (CE) produces market goods and/or provides services in the interest to its members, such as communities, customers, and suppliers. The upsurge of interest in social enterprises, and their balancing of social and economic interests, has also led to a renewed interest in CEs, often seen as a specific type of social enterprise. However, from an organizational perspective, this renewed interest has been both limited and scattered over a variety of fields. In this paper, we systematically review papers on CE in the mainstream organizational literature, defined as literature in the fields of economics, business, management and sociology. Our review integrates and synthesizes the current topics in the mainstream organizational literature and provides a number of avenues for future research. In addition, we compare our findings in the organizational literature to the social issues literature as these appeared to be quite complimentary. We found multilevel studies, determination of social impact—in particular measurable impact, managerial practices for sustainable (organisational) development, and the entrepreneurial opportunity generation process as the four key avenues for future research.

几十年来，合作企业（CE）为其成员（例如社区，客户和供应商）的利益生产市场产品和/或提供服务。对社会企业的兴趣激增，以及它们在社会和经济利益之间的平衡，也导致了人们对行政长官的重新关注，而行政长官通常被视为一种特殊的社会企业。但是，从组织的角度来看，这种重新产生的兴趣既有限，又分散在各个领域。在本文中，我们系统地回顾了主流组织文献中有关CE的论文，这些文献被定义为经济学，商业，管理和社会学领域的文献。我们的综述整合并综合了主流组织文献中的当前主题，并为将来的研究提供了许多途径。此外，我们将组织文献中的发现与社会问题文献中的发现进行了比较，因为它们似乎是相互补充的。我们发现了多层研究，确定社会影响（尤其是可衡量的影响），可持续（组织）发展的管理实践以及创业机会的产生过程，这是未来研究的四个关键途径。