Análisis de los factores de competitividad en cooperativas agrarias. El caso-estudio de las cooperativas citrícolas

[EN] Agrifood cooperatives are entities that perform an important supporting role in both economic and social fields. They help to maintain the roots and the link with the territory in a time when the deagrarisation process is leading to a progressive abandonment of rural areas. They also constitute an excellent means of communication between the market and producers, bringing together the supply, reaching competitive trading volumes and transferring the requirements that consumers and regulators pose. This social aspect should not lead to forget that cooperatives are a legal form of business and, as such, they should be professionally managed and their decisions should be taken following economic and objective criteria, fact that doesn't entail to turn their back to their differentiated form of government or their social concerns and commitments. This thesis focuses on competitiveness factors that are relevant in the agrifood cooperatives. This issue has been, and still is, widely discussed in the academic literature in relation to capitalist companies. However, cooperatives -possibly due to their small number- have scarcely been object of study in this field. We understand that competitiviness factors are those management elements that allow achieving a competitive advantage for organizations, facilitating their operational in the market with greater guarantees. The scope of the study is the Spanish agrifood cooperative sector but given their great heterogeneity, we have constrained our attention to those that are mainly engaged in citrus. However, most of the reached conclusions are applicable to the agri-food cooperative sector given that they are mainly rooted in their identity, type of cooperative management and the peculiar characteristics of the primary sector, and less on the conditions that a specific market introduces. The objectives stated in the thesis are as follows: - Perform a full description of the Spanish agricultural cooperatives in relation to the defned factords of competitiveness. - Classify business cooperative typologies that result after the analysis of the various factors of competitiviness. - Establish the degree of incidence between the different factors of competitiviness in order to assess the combined impact. - Provide, from the point of view of the evidence obtained, suggestions for improving the competitiviness of agri-cooperatives. The research has been sequentially published in prestigious journals, all of them indexed i