Cooperation in Economy and Society

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.

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.