Résumé
French agricultural cooperatives and especially wine ones show differences of corporate objectives, but also common ones with the private merchants, as they face a common economic environment. However traditional controlling and financial models do not seem adequate to measure ‘sustainable social economy’ performances advocated by the cooperatives philosophy. The main difficulty is that their specific corporate governance introduces competition between short term maximum payments to their raw materials suppliers-patrons and long term investment potentials. So facing this “cooperative dilemma”, we may wonder how agricultural cooperatives balance these conflicting objectives, and which performance measurement specificities they should adopt. In order to try and answer this question, the construction (to avoid repetition of design) of an adapted data base appears to be necessary to design a specific economic and financial measurement model. It will take into account the apparent antinomy of the cooperatives short term and long term objectives, in the context of an economically sustainable development. We present the case of the introduction of COOPERFIC, a decision-aid tool for agricultural cooperatives and their subsidiaries, based upon a specially constructed data base in France. The exploratory results obtained from the test of an original performance measurement model on an ad hoc sample of 87 wine cooperatives lead to some useful guidelines in terms of cooperative governance. Results reveal the apparent antinomy of these firms’ short term and long term objectives, in order to reach their economic and social objectives. This is a “cooperative dilemma’ as well as a “performance measurement dilemma”. These results go also against prejudices or common place lightening that enhancing products value is often much more efficient, as far as members’ payment is concerned, than a reduction of fixed costs or economies of scale.