Cooperation in Economy and Society

Cooperation in Economy and Society
Author: Robert C. Marshall
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 075911983X

The essays in the book analyze cases of cooperation in a wide range of ethnographic, archaeological and evolutionary settings. Cooperation is examined in situations of market exchange, local and long-distance reciprocity, hierarchical relations, common property and commons access, and cooperatives. Not all of these analyses show stable and long-term results of successful cooperation. The increasing cooperation that is so highly characteristic of our species over the long term obviously has replaced neither competition in the short term nor hierarchical structures that reduce competition in the mid term. Interactions based on strategies of cooperation, competition, and hierarchy are all found, simultaneously, in human social relations.

Cooperation in Economy and Society

Cooperation in Economy and Society
Author: Robert C. Marshall
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN: 9780759119826

This book explores the burgeoning interest in human cooperation among anthropologists, political scientists, economists, evolutionary psychologists, and biologists. Though typically neglected, cooperation is a crucial part of the triangle of allocation, formed with competition and obedience.

Collective Courage

Collective Courage
Author: Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2015-06-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0271064269

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Moral Sentiments and Material Interests

Moral Sentiments and Material Interests
Author: Herbert Gintis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262072526

Moral Sentiments and Material Interests presents an innovative synthesis of research in different disciplines to argue that cooperation stems not from the stereotypical selfish agent acting out of disguised self-interest but from the presence of "strong reciprocators" in a social group. Presenting an overview of research in economics, anthropology, evolutionary and human biology, social psychology, and sociology, the book deals with both the theoretical foundations and the policy implications of this explanation for cooperation. Chapter authors in the remaining parts of the book discuss the behavioral ecology of cooperation in humans and nonhuman primates, modeling and testing strong reciprocity in economic scenarios, and reciprocity and social policy. The evidence for strong reciprocity in the book includes experiments using the famous Ultimatum Game (in which two players must agree on how to split a certain amount of money or they both get nothing.)

Commerce and Community

Commerce and Community
Author: Robert F. Garnett Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2014-11-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 131756927X

Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained renewed visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The monistic, mechanical "economic systems" that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have given way to pluralistic ecologies of economic provisioning in which complexly constituted agents cooperate via heterogeneous forms of production and exchange. Through the lenses of multiple disciplines, this book examines how this pluralistic turn in economic thinking bears upon the venerable social–theoretical division of cooperative activity into separate spheres of impersonal Gesellschaft (commerce) and ethically thick Gemeinschaft (community). Drawing resources from diverse disciplinary and philosophical traditions, these essays offer fresh, critical appraisals of the Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft segregation of face-to-face community from impersonal commerce. Some authors issue urgent calls to transcend this dualism, whilst others propose to recast it in more nuanced ways or affirm the importance of treating impersonal and personal cooperation as ethically, epistemically, and economically separate worlds. Yet even in their disagreements, our contributors paint the process of voluntary cooperation – the space commerce and community – with uncommon color and nuance by traversing the boundaries that once separated the thin sociality of economics (as science of commerce) from the thick sociality of sociology and anthropology (as sciences of community). This book facilitates critical exchange among economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social theorists by exploring the overlapping notions of cooperation, rationality, identity, reciprocity, trust, and exchange that emerge from multiple analytic traditions within and across their respective disciplines.

Social Regeneration and Local Development

Social Regeneration and Local Development
Author: Silvia Sacchetti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1315302454

Social regeneration is about the transformative processes that, through institutional choices that embody cooperation and inclusion, develop opportunities and capabilities for weak categories, and transversally for society. The challenge of social regeneration can be addressed, in part, through organisational solutions increasingly identified with social economy organisations, since they are characterised by a social objective, cooperation and inclusive democratic governance. Besides the organisational element, Social Regeneration and Local Development provides a new perspective on interacting socio-economic factors, which can work in synergy with the social economy organisations model to promote and sustain social regeneration and well-being. Such elements include civic engagement and social capital, the nature of the welfare system, the use of physical assets in urban and rural areas, leadership, technology, and finance. By analysing organisational and contextual elements, this book offers an institutional perspective on how socio-economic systems can reply to challenges such as social and environmental degradation, financial crises, immigration, inequality, and marginalisation.

What We Owe Each Other

What We Owe Each Other
Author: Minouche Shafik
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022-08-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 069120764X

From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.

Creating Cooperation

Creating Cooperation
Author: Pepper D. Culpepper
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501723626

In Creating Cooperation, Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills, but uncertainty and mutual distrust among companies doom many policy initiatives to failure. Higher skills benefit society as a whole, so national governments want to foster them. However, business firms often will not invest in training that makes their workers more attractive to other employers, even though they would prefer having better-skilled workers.Culpepper sees in European training programs a challenge typical of contemporary problems of public policy: success increasingly depends on the ability of governments to convince private actors to cooperate with each other. In the United States as in Europe, he argues, policy-makers can achieve this goal only by incorporating the insights of private information into public policy. Culpepper demonstrates that the lessons of decentralized cooperation extend to industrial and environmental policies. In the final chapter, he examines regional innovation programs in the United Kingdom and the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay in the United States—a domestic problem that required the coordination of disparate agencies and stakeholders.

Cooperation and Community

Cooperation and Community
Author: Jeffrey H. Cohen
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2010-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292789785

In the villages and small towns of Oaxaca, Mexico, as in much of rural Latin America, cooperation among neighbors is essential for personal and community survival. It can take many forms, from godparenting to sponsoring fiestas, holding civic offices, or exchanging agricultural or other kinds of labor. This book examines the ways in which the people of Santa Ana del Valle practice these traditional cooperative and reciprocal relationships and also invent new relationships to respond to global forces of social and economic change at work within their community. Based on fieldwork he conducted in this Zapotec-speaking community between 1992 and 1996, Jeffrey Cohen describes continuities in the Santañeros' practices of cooperation, as well as changes resulting from transnational migration, tourism, increasing educational opportunities, and improved communications. His nuanced portrayal of the benefits and burdens of cooperation is buttressed by the words of many villagers who explain why and how they participate-or not-in reciprocal family and community networks. This rich ethnographic material offers a working definition of community created in and through cooperative relationships.