Empirical Study on Identifying Collaborative Practices in Local Communities

Our scientific approach addresses the issue of the economic collaboration of a community respectively the social economy enterprise. Our motivation is due to the profound transformations through which socio-economic activities pass over the last quarter of a century, more emphasized than ever by the particularities of the digital age. Social economy enterprises are also the subject to permanent adaptation to environmental conditions. Following the continuity of this process it was inevitable to avoid the following question, which has become the main objective of our paper: in an era where almost all processes and systems are digitized, leading to an increase in individualism, there still is availability for collaboration and if so, which are its defining factors? To answer this question we have initiated an exploratory analysis that allowed us to identify a number of defining factors of cooperation, each of them representing as many collaborative practices experienced in local communities. Analysis of data obtained as a result of the survey, conducted via questionnaire, was performed using IBM SPSS application. Interpretation of results is achieved by using optimal scaling technique known as categorical principal component analysis, CATPCA.