Cooperation in Economy and Society

by Marshall, Robert C.; Acheson, James; Bird, Matthew; Clark, Gracia; Dahlin, Bruce; Dow, Malcolm; Eff, E Anthon; Fuentes, Agustín; Greene, Katrina T.; Hogeland, Julie; Hutson, Scott R.; Lesorogol, Carolyn; Mazeau, Daniel; Millar, Kathleen; Oka, Rahul; Porte

• ISBN13: 9780759119819
• ISBN10: 0759119813
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-16
• Publisher: AltaMira Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Robert C. Marshall is professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Western Washington University. He has been studying Japan's worker cooperatives since 1991 and began research in 2002 on Japan's "senior cooperatives," a new consumer-worker cooperative hybrid of, by, and for the elderly, as a fellow of the Japan Foundation. His article "The Culture of Cooperation in Three Japanese Worker Cooperatives" appeared in the journal Economic and Industrial Democracy.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Cooperation and Competition
From Reciprocity to Trade: How Cooperative Infrastructures Form the Basis of Human Socioeconomic Evolution	p. 3
Market Integration and Prosocial Behavior: Evidence from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample	p. 29
Critique of Reciprocity: Shifting Uses and Meanings of Ayni among Andean Groups	p. 55
Commerce and Cooperation among the Classic Maya: The Chunchucmil Case	p. 81
Cooperation and Hierarchy
Cooperation in Conflict: Negotiating Inequality in Midwestern U.S. Hog Contracting	p. 107
Cooperation, Equality, and Difference: Loyalty and Accountability in Ghana's Marketplace Commodity Groups	p. 129
Testing the Limits of Nonzero: Cooperation, Conflict, and Hierarchy in Ancient Near Eastern Marginal Environments	p. 149
Cooperation and Cooperatives
Cooperation in the Informal Economy: The Case of Recyclers at a Brazilian Garbage Dump	p. 175
Is It Possible to Overcome the "Tragedy of Ubuntu"? The Journey of a Black Women's Economic Empowerment Group in South Africa	p. 195
The Normative Construction of U.S. Agricultural Cooperatives, 1900-2008	p. 215
Cooperation Rising
Creating Common Grazing Rights on Private Parcels: How New Rules Produce Incentives for Cooperative Land Management	p. 239
Cooperation and the Development of Conservation Laws: The Case of the Maine Lobster Industry	p. 259
Index	p. 279
About the Editor and Contributors	p. 291
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