Cooperation In Communities Research Articles

A meta-communication model for structuring intercultural communication action patterns

This paper presents a meta-communication model for discursive construction of communication action patterns that may be part of an information system which supports communication and cooperation in virtual intercultural communities. The paper also provides a brief review of previous ideas on meta-communication from the language action perspective.

Cheating monkeys and citizen bees: the nature of cooperation in animals and humans

Here biologist Lee Dugatkin outlines four paths to co-operation shared by humans and other animals: family dynamics, reciprocal transactions (or tit for tat), so-called selfish teamwork, and group altruism. He draws on a wealth of examples - from baby-sitting among mongooses and food sharing among vampire bats to co-operation in Hutterite communities and on kibbutzism -to show not only that co-operation exists throughout the animal kingdom, but how an understanding of the natural history of altruism might foster our own best instincts towards our fellow humans.

Social Relations and Cooperation in Organizations

The paper addresses the effects of social relations on cooperation (or collusion) in organizations and communities. and production relations are modeled as separate repeated strategic interactions. Linking them--by employing members of the same community or by encouraging social interaction between employees--is shown to facilitate cooperation in production: (a) because of available Social Capital, the slack of net expected gains from cooperation in the social relations which can be credibly transferred to discipline behavior in the workplace; (b) because payoffs from the social and production relations tend to be substitutes, in which case the linkage of more relations endogenously generates (a sort of increasing returns in cooperation); (c) because the linkage generates transfers of trust, reputation spillovers from a cooperative social background to newly started production relations; and (d) because agents who share social relations have access to additional information about each other's situations. The model provides a microfoundation for Putnam's concept of Social Capital and for Granovetter's idea of embeddedness for the employment relation. It shows that Kandel and Lazear's peer pressures are a credible effort-enforcing mechanism even when teams' members are fully self-interested, and that the threat of social sanctions can credibly enforce social norms independent of agents' moral constraints (that is, no second-order free rider problem exists). It provides an explanation for Japanese firms' investments in employees' free-time activities, for the Grameen Bank's requirement that group members belong to the same village and participate in social activities, for the ambiguous empirical results on the effectiveness of group-incentives, for markets' tendency to crowd out cooperative institutions, and for the sudden breakdown in trust and cooperation observed in communities after a war ends and peace is established.

Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

1. Foreword 2. Introduction 3. I. Linguistic Perspectives 4. Electronic Language: A new variety of English (by Collot, Milena) 5. Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing (by Yates, Simeon J.) 6. Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat (by Werry, Christopher C.) 7. Functional comparisons of face-to-face and computer-mediated decision making interactions (by Condon, Sherri L.) 8. Two variants of an electronic message schema (by Herring, Susan C.) 9. II. Social and Ethical Perspectives 10. Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities (by Kollock, Peter) 11. Our passionate response to virtual reality (by Deuel, Nancy R.) 12. Cyberfeminism (by Hall, Kira) 13. III. Cross-Cultural Perspectives 14. Computer-mediated conversations as a new dimension of intercultural communication between East Asian and North American college students (by Ma, Ringo) 15. Perceptions of American culture: The impact of an electronically-mediated cultural exchange program on Mexican high school students (by Meagher, Mary Elaine) 16. Visible conversation and academic inquiry: CMC in a culturally diverse classroom (by Golomb, Gregory G.) 17. IV. CMC and group Interaction 18. Group dynamics in an e-mail forum (by Korenman, Joan) 19. Writing to work: How using e-mail can reflect technological and organizational change (by Ziv, Oren) 20. The rhetorical dynamics of a community protest in cyberspace: What happened with Lotus Marketplace (by Gurak, Laura J.) 21. References 22. Index of names 23. Index of subjects

A Theory of Ethnic Group Boundaries

Abstract. Despite widespread agreement that ethnic boundaries are malleable rather than fixed, theories of ethnicity and collective action have been unable to adequately explain why individuals choose to mobilise collectively within particular boundaries rather than others. The boundaries of groups engaging in ethnic collective action are always taken for granted at some level rather than problematised. This leads to an undesirable reification of ethnic groups as actors.The theory presented in this article integrates a social psychological view of motivation with a rational choice view of action to provide a systematic way of predicting the boundary location of ethnic groups that begin to mobilise in societies undergoing modernising structural change. It first focuses on the link between cooperation and altruism in small communities. It then predicts how altruistic preferences, in conjunction with structural factors and rational behaviour, will generate boundaries for larger‐scale ethnic collective action that transcends yet incorporates such communities. The theory's predictions are then applied to explain the location of group boundaries in four very prominent cases of ethnicity ‘creation’ and collective action in this century.

Metabolic cooperation in oral microbial communities during growth on mucin.

Hog gastric mucin has been used as a model glycoprotein to determine the role of particular glycosidases produced by different oral bacteria in the development of stable, diverse microbial communities. The patterns of glycosidase and protease activity were determined in pure cultures of ten representative species of oral bacteria using synthetic substrates. A five-member mixed culture was established in a chemostat, comprising species with minimal glycosidase and protease activity, in which hog gastric mucin was the major carbon and energy source. Introduction of additional species with novel enzyme activities (e.g. sialidase, alpha-fucosidase and endopeptidase) led to their establishment within the community to make communities with seven, eight, nine and ten members and resulted in an increase in the total viable counts of the microbial consortium. This increase in viable count was made up of the numbers of the newly added species as well as from a rise in the numbers of the existing community members. This result suggested that glycoprotein catabolism involved the synergistic and concerted action of several species with overlapping patterns of enzyme activity. Such metabolic cooperation results in the liberation of additional nutrients, and this may help to maintain the characteristic diversity of resident microbial communities found in many natural habitats.

Cooperation and conflict: A case study of a women's research network in Norway

During four years (1978–82), 25–30 Norweigian women social scientists formed a research network of small local groups, studying ‘Women's mutual relations’ in various settings. Women's friendships, their cooperation in factories and local communities and in women's organizations were the focus of our research. This article, however, is not about the results of our research—although some of them are reported in the notes—but we describe the organization of our association, its purposes, structure and positive results, as well as our tendencies to build up conflict, fractionalism and withdrawal. The research network was established in opposition to male social science, both with respect to the choice of its main themes and its organizational form. A supportive work style, a ‘horizontal’ structure and a playing down of conflicts was more or less deliberately chosen by the network members. We discuss here some of the types of conflict that developed in the network, and the ways we dealt with them. Most conflicts were either solved ‘talking through’ or handled by avoidance. We ask the question if deliberate conflict avoidance is functional for a feminist network of organization. The case is made for a ‘horizontal network organization as a positive and fruitful supplement to usual academic organization structure.

A stochastic process model of conflict and cooperation in Andean communities

Whyte's (1975) study of perceived conflict and cooperation in Andean communities elucidated four community types represented by combinations of these two variables and analyzed community stability and change from one type to another over a five‐year period. Using a Markov model, we deduce what the expected future distribution of community types will be if present trends continue and what these projections reveal about long‐term processes of community evolution in this region.

Conflict and cooperation in Andean communities

This paper presents a framework for the analysis of cooperation and conflict based on surveys and anthropological studies of Peruvian rural communities and an examination of the literature on the nature of peasant communities (Redfield, Lewis, Foster, and others). Instead of considering these qualities of human relations as opposite ends of the same continuum, the framework presents two separate continua: high-low cooperation and high-low conflict.

Conflict and Cooperation in American Communities

Conflict and Cooperation in American Communities