South Dakota Soybean Processors: The Discourse of Conversion from Cooperative to Limited Liability Corporation

On June 20, 2002, the members of the South Dakota Soybean Processors (SDSP) Cooperative approved the reorganization of the cooperative into a limited liability company. Between the vote of the SDSP board of directors to reorganize on October 12, 2001 and the majority vote of the membership to approve the reorganization, there was no public discussion about the issue in the major media. In the absence of any public opposition to the conversion, the vote by the members in favor of conversion would indicate that conversion was relatively uncontroversial. The lack of controversy about conversion would seem to render this issue a non-event not worthy of sociological examination. Even nonevents, however, merit examination, and in this case, the non-event of lack of opposition to conversion is the question to be explained, and the proposed answer to the question is that the hegemonic discourse of neo-classical economics did not permit the consideration of alternative arrangements by which the company would have retained a cooperative format. The contention of this paper is that the discourse of neoclassical economics has become a heuristic narrative in the way that it organizes common sense and hinders oppositional discourses. To that extent, neoclassical economics’ theories become self-fulfilling through institutional design, social norms, and language.