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Norms, typically enforced via sanctions, are key to resolving collective-action problems. But it is often impossible to know what each individual member is contributing to group efforts and enforce cooperation accordingly. Especially as group size increases, people commonly have access to the behaviors of—and can sanction—only those to whom they are tied in a broader network. Here we integrate two streams of research: one conceptualizing ties in networked collective-action groups as access to information about what others are doing and a second where ties represent information plus opportunities to enforce cooperation via punishment. While both have pointed to the cooperation benefits of more ties in the network, we argue that these benefits will depend on group size and whether ties provide access to information about what others are doing or whether they also entail opportunities for norm enforcement. Our experiment demonstrates that densely tied information networks facilitate cooperation but only when the group size is small. When people can also enforce their ties' cooperation, however, densely tied networks particularly benefit larger groups. The results demonstrate how network-level properties and individual-level tie patterns intersect to promote contributions in small and large collective-action groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging literature suggests that the success of social movements depends, partly, on their ability to garner support from third‐party groups. One factor that appears to predict support is social movements' use of nonviolent (compared to violent) strategies to achieve their goals. However, this literature is not definitive. Herein, we report the results of a meta‐analysis of research that has assessed the effect of the use of nonviolence on third‐party support (k = 16, N = 4598). A small‐to‐moderate positive effect was observed, d = 0.25. Additionally, research that used a control or baseline comparison group suggested that using nonviolent strategies marginally (p =.090) increased people's willingness to help the movement (d = 0.17) while adopting violent strategies did not increase or decrease people's willingness to help the movement (d = −0.03). Publication bias was evidenced by bigger effect sizes of published (vs. unpublished) studies. Target (i.e., state vs. social issues) and location of the protest (i.e., domestic vs. foreign) were not significant moderators, whereas the context (i.e., real vs. hypothetical scenarios) was, although marginally. Results suggest that it behooves social movements to adopt nonviolent strategies if third‐party support is desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Stratified groups face at least two obstacles in solving collective action problems and producing public goods. Individuals face temptation to free ride, and high‐ranking group members face incentives to protect their position at the group's expense. We introduce democratic competition for rank as a solution to the problem of cooperation in groups. We argue that democratic competition for high rank creates incentives for cooperation that are absent in nondemocratic groups. Methods: In a small‐group behavioral experiment, we contrast groups in which individuals compete for a valuable high‐ranking position through democratic elections with groups in which individuals compete for high rank in resource‐based competitions. Groups faceda fluctuating external threat, and group members could invest resources in manipulating the apparent (but not actual) level of this threat. Results: We find that democratic groups reward high contributors by electing them to the high‐ranking position at greater rates than low contributors. We also find evidence that individuals in democratic groups contribute more to the public good than individuals in nondemocratic groups. However, high‐ranking individuals in democratic groups exaggerate threats to the group at similar rates to high‐ranking individuals in nondemocratic groups. Conclusion: The findings suggest that democratic competition increases public goods production and overall group efficiency, but does not eliminate—and may exacerbate—individuals' tendency to deceive their peers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on literatures on social movements and collective action, mentalization, and morality, four studies investigated whether a social movement's use of nonviolence can increase people's willingness to support and join the movement. In a correlational study with a nested design, across 23 movements perceived use of nonviolence predicted participants' willingness to support and join the movement (Study 1, n = 203). This effect was also found experimentally, with Americans supporting nonviolent movements more than violent ones, in hypothetical and real foreign countries (Study 2 and 3, ns = 606 and 373). Study 4 (n = 247) replicated the effects in participants' own country. The effects were transmitted by attribution of mental states to nonviolent movements and subsequent greater perceived morality (Study 2–4). This research demonstrates that nonviolence can benefit social movements in terms of support and mobilization potential, and that these benefits are rooted in perceptions of mental capacity, humanness, and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overcoming environmental challenges requires understanding when and why individuals adopt cooperative behaviors, how individual behaviors and interactions among resource users change over time, and how group structure and group dynamics impact behaviors, institutions, and resource conditions. Cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) is a theoretical framework derived from theories of cultural evolution and cultural group selection that emphasizes pressures affecting different levels of social organization as well as conflicts among these levels. As such, CMLS can be useful for understanding many environmental challenges. With this paper, we use evidence from the literature and hypothetical scenarios to show how the framework can be used to understand the emergence and persistence of sustainable social-ecological systems. We apply the framework to the Balinese system of rice production and focus on two important cultural traits (synchronized cropping and the institutions and rituals associated with water management). We use data from the literature that discusses bottom-up (self-organized, complex adaptive system) and top-down explanations for the system and discuss how (1) the emergence of group structure, (2) group-level variation in cropping strategies, institutions, and rituals, and (3) variation in overall yields as a result of different strategies and institutions, could have allowed for the spread of group-beneficial traits and the increasing complexity of the system. We also outline cultural transmission mechanisms that can explain the spread of group-beneficial traits in Bali and describe the kinds of data that would be required to validate the framework in forward-looking studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success or failure of human collective action often depends on the cooperation tendencies of individuals in groups, and on the information that individuals have about each other’s cooperativeness. However, it is unclear whether these two factors have an interactive effect on cooperation dynamics. Using a decision-making experiment, we confirm that groups comprising individuals with higher cooperation tendencies cooperate at a higher level than groups comprising individuals with low cooperation tendencies. Moreover, assorting individuals with similar cooperation tendency together affected behaviour so that the most cooperative individuals tended to cooperate more and the least cooperative individuals cooperated less, compared to their behaviour in randomly formed groups. In line with predictions of evolutionary models of cooperation, there was a strong positive association between individuals’ cooperation tendency and success when groups were formed assortatively, whereas such association did not exist when groups were formed randomly. Surprisingly, information about group members’ cooperativeness in assorted groups had no effect on cooperation levels. We discuss potential explanations for why information about cooperativeness of others may be disregarded in certain circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kumanan Rasanathan and colleagues argue that the potential of multisectoral collaboration for improving health remains untapped in many low- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Growing interest in collaborative goal-setting has raised questions. First, are patients making the 'right choices' from a biomedical perspective? Second, are patients and providers setting goals of appropriate difficulty? Finally, what types of support will patients need to accomplish their goals? We analyzed goals and action plans from a trial of collaborative goal-setting among 302 residents of a high-poverty urban region who had multiple chronic conditions.Methods: Patients used a low-literacy aid to prioritize one of their chronic conditions and then set a goal for that condition with their primary care provider. Patients created patient-driven action plans for reaching these goals.Results: Patients chose to focus on conditions that were in poor control and set ambitious chronic disease management goals. The mean goal weight loss -16.8lbs (SD 19.5), goal HbA1C reduction was -1.3% (SD 1.7%) and goal blood pressure reduction was -9.8mmHg (SD 19.2mmHg). Patient-driven action plans spanned domains including health behavior (58.9%) and psychosocial (23.5%).Conclusions: High-risk, low-SES patients identified high priority conditions, set ambitious goals and generate individualized action plans for chronic disease management.Practice Implications: Practices may require flexible personnel who can support patients using a blend of coaching, social support and navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do individuals deal with group disadvantage when their fellow in-group members conceive it as legitimate? Integrating research on the normative conflict model (Packer, 2008, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev., 12, 50) and collective action, we expect high identifiers to reject the in-group norm of legitimacy that justifies the inequality, and to assert that the group is actually able and willing to contest the disadvantage by collective means. In Study 1 and Study 2, we tested this hypothesis in different intergroup contexts. The results confirmed our predictions and also showed one boundary condition for high identifiers, namely that the content of the social identity supports resistance. In Study 3, we found support for our hypothesis using artificial groups and manipulating identification experimentally. These results show that even when a disadvantaged group appears to accept its situation, high identified in-group members will still contest this and, moreover, expect other in-group members to support them in this endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Members of the healthcare team must access and share patient information to coordinate interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). Although some evidence suggests that electronic health records (EHRs) contribute to in-team communication breakdowns, EHRs are still widely hailed as tools that support ICP. If EHRs are expected to promote ICP, researchers must be able to longitudinally study the impact of EHRs on ICP across communication types, users, and physical locations.Objective: This paper presents a data collection and analysis tool, named the Map of the Clinical Interprofessional Communication Spaces (MCICS), which supports examining how EHRs impact ICP over time, and across communication types, users, and physical locations.Methods: The tool's development evolved during a large prospective longitudinal study conducted at a Canadian pediatric academic tertiary-care hospital. This two-phased study [i.e., pre-implementation (phase 1) and post implementation (phase 2)] of an EHR employed a constructivist grounded theory approach and triangulated data collection strategies (i.e., non-participant observations, interviews, think-alouds, and document analysis). The MCICS was created through a five-step process: (i) preliminary structural development based on the use of the paper-based chart (phase 1); (ii) confirmatory review and modification process (phase 1); (iii) ongoing data collection and analysis facilitated by the map (phase 1); (iv) data collection and modification of map based on impact of EHR (phase 2); and (v) confirmatory review and modification process (phase 2).Results: Creating and using the MCICS enabled our research team to locate, observe, and analyze the impact of the EHR on ICP, (a) across oral, electronic, and paper communications, (b) through a patient's passage across different units in the hospital, (c) across the duration of the patient's stay in hospital, and (d) across multiple healthcare providers. By using the MCICS, we captured a comprehensive, detailed picture of the clinical milieu in which the EHR was implemented, and of the intended and unintended consequences of the EHR's deployment. The map supported our observations and analysis of ICP communication spaces, and of the role of the patient chart in these spaces.Conclusions: If EHRs are expected to help resolve ICP challenges, it is important that researchers be able to longitudinally assess the impact of EHRs on ICP across multiple modes of communication, users, and physical locations. Mapping the clinical communication spaces can help EHR designers, clinicians, educators and researchers understand these spaces, appreciate their complexity, and navigate their way towards effective use of EHRs as means for supporting ICP. We propose that the MCICS can be used "as is" in other academic tertiary-care pediatric hospitals, and can be tailored for use in other healthcare institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biomedical research complex has been estimated to consume almost a quarter of a trillion US dollars every year. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that a high proportion of this sum is avoidably wasted. In 2014, The Lancet published a series of five reviews showing how dividends from the investment in research might be increased from the relevance and priorities of the questions being asked, to how the research is designed, conducted, and reported. 17 recommendations were addressed to five main stakeholders-funders, regulators, journals, academic institutions, and researchers. This Review provides some initial observations on the possible effects of the Series, which seems to have provoked several important discussions and is on the agendas of several key players. Some examples of individual initiatives show ways to reduce waste and increase value in biomedical research. This momentum will probably move strongly across stakeholder groups, if collaborative relationships evolve between key players; further important work is needed to increase research value. A forthcoming meeting in Edinburgh, UK, will provide an initial forum within which to foster the collaboration needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1980s, the national health policy in Nigeria has sought to inspire community engagement in primary health care by bringing communities into partnership with service providers through community health committees. Using a realist approach to understand how and under what circumstances the committees function, we explored 581 meeting minutes from 129 committees across four states in Nigeria (Lagos, Benue, Nasarawa and Kaduna). We found that community health committees provide opportunities for improving the demand and supply of health care in their community. Committees demonstrate five modes of functioning: through meetings (as 'village square'), reaching out within their community (as 'community connectors'), lobbying governments for support (as 'government botherers'), inducing and augmenting government support (as 'back-up government') and taking control of health care in their community (as 'general overseers'). In performing these functions, community health committees operate within and through the existing social, cultural and religious structures of their community, thereby providing an opportunity for the health facility with which they are linked to be responsive to the needs and values of the community. But due to power asymmetries, committees have limited capacity to influence health facilities for improved performance, and governments for improved health service provision. This is perhaps because national guidelines are not clear on their accountability functions; they are not aware of the minimum standards of services to expect; and they have a limited sense of legitimacy in their relations with sub-national governments because they are established as the consequence of a national policy. Committees therefore tend to promote collective action for self-support more than collective action for demanding accountability. To function optimally, community health committees require national government or non-government organization mentoring and support; they need to be enshrined in law to bolster their sense of legitimacy; and they also require financial support to subsidise their operation costs especially in geographically large communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Cooperation is central to collective management of common pool small-scale fisheries. [•] Public Goods Games (PGG) can be tailored to mimic the cooperation dilemma associated with common pool fisheries. [•] We used a PGG to elucidate fishers’ cooperative behavior and Ostrom's framework to understand the factors influencing it. [•] The factors influencing cooperative behavior were age, occupation, and beliefs about fishing access for commercial gain. [•] Our analysis provides guidance in understanding cooperation in relation to collective management of fisheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study examines the roles of gesture repetition in the process of collaboratively shaping ideas. The data involve three college students brainstorming for the production of a short film. Employing primarily language and depictive gestures, the participants collaboratively shape ideas of the film scenes, characters’ actions, and camerawork; they accept or reject each other''s proposals, elaborate upon them, modify a part of them, and/or combine them into complex wholes. In particular, by repeating one another''s gestures (or components thereof), the participants can show their manipulation of one another''s ideas. On the one hand, the analyses demonstrate that the participants can indicate full acceptance of the previous speaker''s idea, a cooperative move, by fully repeating the gesture produced during its proposal. On the other hand, a partial or modified repeat of the previous gesture does not signal complete acceptance of the previous proposal: the repeated feature of the gesture represents an accepted part of the previous proposal, but the modified feature of the gesture reveals exactly what the speaker does not accept and suggests instead. The present study thus demonstrates how repetition or modification of gestures across speakers serves to create coherence and to display cooperation and competition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Housing is an area in which the active involvement of citizens in the provision of services has the potential to enrich individual lifestyles, local communities and the organisations providing housing, regardless of whether public, private for-profit or non-profit. Yet in current housing markets, housing tends to be purely individual, in the form of home ownership, or collectively managed through social rented housing. The article explores the conditions under which co-production in this field could be successful, as an alternative model. The analysis, which draws upon the work of Ostrom, is based on empirical fieldwork carried out among German housing cooperatives. As it turns out, successful co-production depends primarily on the long-term maintenance of group boundaries and specific trajectories of organisational development. This can make co-production an attractive model for specific social groups, but there are drawbacks: it also tends to lead to limited use of the invested capital and an inward orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The idea that voluntary participation may promote the evolution of cooperation and punishment in public good games has been recently called into question based on the study of the complete strategy set in which anyone can punish anyone else. If punishment actions are detached from contribution and participation in the game, the combination of punishment and voluntary participation no longer leads to high levels of cooperation. We show that this result crucially depends on specific details of the role of those who abstain from the collective endeavour, and only holds for a small subset of assumptions. If these loners are truly alone, cooperators who punish only defectors prevail, even when antisocial punishment is available. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

. In this paper, we examine the question of whether a collective activity can influence cooperation in a subsequent repeated one-shot prisoner's dilemma (PD) game. We conduct two series of experiments. The first consists of control experiments in which 30 periods of a PD game are played, with a random rematching of the pairs in every period. In a second series of experiments, subjects first play a donation game (DG) and then the PD game. In the DG, they collectively discuss the amount of a donation to a given charity, before putting the question to an individual and anonymous vote. Cooperation levels in the PD games preceded by the DG are significantly lower than those observed in the control experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse generosity, second-party ('spiteful') punishment (2PP), and third-party ('altruistic') punishment (3PP) in a cross-cultural experimental economics project. We show that smaller societies are less generous in the Dictator Game but no less prone to 2PP in the Ultimatum Game. We might assume people everywhere would be more willing to punish someone who hurt them directly (2PP) than someone who hurt an anonymous third person (3PP). While this is true of small societies, people in large societies are actually more likely to engage in 3PP than 2PP. Strong reciprocity, including generous offers and 3PP, exists mostly in large, complex societies that face numerous challenging collective action problems. We argue that 'spiteful' 2PP, motivated by the basic emotion of anger, is more universal than 3PP and sufficient to explain the origins of human cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To investigate the association between self-reported endometriosis and the putative functional promoter +331C/T single nucleotide polymorphism and the PROGINS allele.Design: Control subjects from ovarian cancer case-control studies participating in the international Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium. The majority of controls are drawn from population-based studies.Setting: An international ovarian cancer consortium including studies from Australia, Europe, and the United States.Patient(s): Five thousand eight hundred twelve white female controls, of whom 348 had endometriosis, from eight ovarian cancer case-control studies.Intervention(s): None.Main Outcome Measure(s): Genotypes for the +331C/T single nucleotide polymorphism and PROGINS allele and a history of endometriosis.Result(s): The occurrence of endometriosis was reduced in women carrying one or more copies of the +331 T allele (odds ratio=0.65; 95% confidence interval: 0.43-0.98), whereas there was no association between the PROGINS allele and endometriosis (odds ratio=0.94, 95% confidence interval 0.76-1.16).Conclusion(s): Additional studies of the +331C/T variant are warranted given the current finding and the equivocal results of previous studies. The +331 T allele has been shown to result in a reduced progesterone (P) receptor A to P receptor B ratio, and if the observed association with endometriosis is confirmed it would suggest that this ratio is important for this disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: All social species face various “collective action problems” (CAPs) or “social dilemmas,” meaning problems in achieving cooperating when the best move from a selfish point of view yields an inferior collective outcome. Compared to most other species, humans are very good at solving these challenges, suggesting that something rather peculiar about human sociality facilitates collective action. This article proposes that language — the uniquely human faculty of symbolic communication — fundamentally alters the possibilities for collective action. I explore these issues using simple game-theoretic models and empirical evidence (both ethnographic and experimental). I review several standard mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation — mutualism, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity and signaling — highlighting their limitations when it comes to explaining large-group cooperation, as well as the ways in which language helps overcome those limitations. Language facilitates complex coordination and is essential for establishing norms governing production efforts and distribution of collective goods that motivate people to cooperate voluntarily in large groups. Language also significantly lowers the cost of detecting and punishing “free riders,” thus greatly enhancing the scope and power of standard conditional reciprocity. In addition, symbolic communication encourages new forms of collectively beneficial displays and reputation management — what evolutionists often term “signaling” and “indirect reciprocity.” Thus, language reinforces existing forces that favor the evolution of cooperation, as well as creating new opportunities for collective action not available even to our closest primate relatives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: For many years in evolutionary science, the consensus view has been that while reciprocal altruism can evolve in dyadic interactions, it is unlikely to evolve in sizable groups. This view had been based on studies which have assumed cooperation to be discrete rather than continuous (i.e., individuals can either fully cooperate or else fully defect, but they cannot continuously vary their level of cooperation). In real world cooperation, however, cooperation is often continuous. In this paper, we re-examine the evolution of reciprocity in sizable groups by presenting a model of the n-person prisoner''s dilemma that assumes continuous rather than discrete cooperation. This model shows that continuous reciprocity has a dramatically wider basin of attraction than discrete reciprocity, and that this basin''s size increases with efficiency of cooperation (marginal per capita return). Further, we find that assortative interaction interacts synergistically with continuous reciprocity to a much greater extent than it does with discrete reciprocity. These results suggest that previous models may have underestimated reciprocity''s adaptiveness in groups. However, we also find that the invasion of continuous reciprocators into a population of unconditional defectors becomes realistic only within a narrow parameter space in which the efficiency of cooperation is close to its maximum bound. Therefore our model suggests that continuous reciprocity can evolve in large groups more easily than discrete reciprocity only under unusual circumstances. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In response to increasing demands for greater coordination and collaboration among community institutions, interorganizational collaboratives (i.e., coalitions, partnerships, coordinating councils) have emerged as a popular mechanism for strengthening the capacity of a community system to respond to public and social issues. This study adopts a network approach to explore the relative importance of dense networks of cooperative relationships among members of interorganizational collaboratives for two outcomes of effectiveness: improving interorganizational coordination and fostering systems change. Based on survey and social network data collected from 48 different collaboratives, findings indicate that, relative to other key characteristics of collaboratives identified in previous literature, cooperative stakeholder relationships were the strongest predictor of systems change outcomes. However, for coordination outcomes, stakeholder relationships were overshadowed in importance by the leadership and decision making capacity of the collaborative. Collectively, findings suggest key differences in the requisite capacity profiles for coordination and systems change outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers guided by evolutionary psychology have theorized that in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, reciprocal behavior is a product of evolutionary design, where individuals are guided by an innate sense of fairness for equal outcomes. Empathy as a prosocial emotion could be a key to understanding the psychological underpinnings of why and who tends to cooperate in a collective act. In short, why are some individuals more prone to participate in collective action? The authors test the hypothesis that a prosocial psychological disposition, stemming from self-reported empathy, will lead to group-oriented behavior in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. Results suggest that an empathetic disposition does not lead to a higher rate of cooperation but interacts with environmental conditioning to produce either a highly cooperative or highly uncooperative personality type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a refined explanation of why minimal group identities affect cooperation in social dilemmas. The refined approach builds on key tenets of social identity theory to argue that identity affects cooperation by leadings actors to maximize ingroup outcomes and minimize ingroup inequalities. A key implication of the argument is that social identity is predicted to reduce actors' responses to the ‘greed component’ in social dilemmas (the incentive to ‘free-ride’ on others' cooperation), but that it will not affect actors' responses to the ‘fear component’ (the motivation to avoid being ‘suckered’). These predictions stand in contrast to those of two existing explanations of social identity and cooperation. The three arguments are tested against the results of two new experiments. Overall, the results support the refined approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collective action (CA), i.e., a group of individuals jointly producing a resource to be shared equally among themselves, is a common interaction in organizational contexts. Ancestral humans who were predisposed to cooperate in CAs would have risked being disadvantaged compared to free riders, but could have overcome this disadvantage through ‘greenbeard’ reciprocity, that is, by assessing the extent to which co-interactants were also predisposed towards cooperation, and then cooperating to the extent that they expected co-interactants to reciprocate. Assessment of others' cooperativeness could have been based on the direct monitoring of, and on reputational information about, others' cooperativeness. This theory predicts that (1) CA participants should monitor accurately, and (2) perceived higher-cooperators should have better reputations. These predictions were supported in a study of real-life CAs carried out by a group of Shuar hunter-horticulturalists: (1) members accurately distinguished ‘intentional’ non-cooperators (who could have cooperated but chose not to) from ‘accidental’ non-cooperators (who were unable to cooperate), and their perceptions of co-member cooperativeness accurately reflected more objective measures of this cooperativeness; and (2) perceived intentional cooperators had better reputations than perceived intentional non-cooperators. These results have direct applications in organizational contexts, for example, for increasing cooperativeness in self-directed work teams. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When dealing with collective phenomena, rational choice theories (RCT) focus mainly on the collective good problem. However, the question of how a collective good becomes a shared concern has not been considered up to now. This article demonstrates theoretical possibilities to answer this question within the frame of reference of RCT. It is argued that issues become shared ones if actors adapt socially shared situational definitions and valuations (e.g. ideolo- gies). This can be understood as a rational choice between several options that provide individual benefits. Such an adaptation occurs only under particular circumstances that can be derived from RCT. At the same time, rational actors influence and shape situa- tional definitions and valuations during the process of adapting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is mainly about cooperation as a collective action in a group context (acting in a position or participating in the performance of a group task, etc.), although the assumption of the presence of a group context is not made in all parts of the paper. The paper clarifies what acting as a group member involves, and it analytically characterizes the "we-mode" (thinking and acting as a group member) and the "I-mode" (thinking and acting as a private person). The main task of the paper is to clarify cooperation, and this is done by dividing cooperation into I-mode and we-mode cooperation. I-mode cooperation relies on the participants' relevantly adjusting their goals toward others' goals and actions to the benefit of all participants. We-mode cooperation basically amounts to joint action in the we-mode. These kinds of cooperation are also connected to the respective kinds of acting as a group member. The paper also investigates the relationship between cooperation and trust and, basically, argues that a two-way connection is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the ability of frontline human service agencies to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Volumes have been written about the importance of increasing human service coordination, collaboration, and service integration to improve the quality and availability of social services for children and families. But most social science research has been restricted to examining how organizational, interorganizational, or societal forces influence human service collaboration. It is at the street level that many social policies are actually enacted, through the interpretations of staff and their interactions with policy clients. If the actual social processes that occur at the front lines are examined, one discovers that frontline staff in both the public bureaucracy and small contractors draw on the same sources of evidence--past relations, daily experiences, clients' stories--when assessing the organizations with which they are mandated to collaborate. Through the social process within each local office, staff come to share a collective assessment of their collaborative partner agencies. These collective beliefs, in turn, create parameters within which staff interpret events and mobilize organizational resources in response.

Rational-choice theorists stress the need for social control to overcome the free-rider problem in collective action. Critics counter that mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement are themselves public goods that presume collective action rather than explain it. In response, Heckathorn (1989) proposed an analytic solution based on "hypocritical cooperation" in which rational actors calculate the optimal allocation of resources between compliance with collective obligations and their enforcement. I relax these "forward-looking'" behavioral assumptions and show how social control might evolve among "backward-looking'" pragmatists. Computer simulations test the ability of various sanctioning regimes to generate cooperation as well as resist stampedes that risk overcooperation and needless sacrifice. External moral sanctions produce too little cooperation, while internalized sanctions produce too much. The best performer induced self-sustaining cooperation and then turned itself off once enforcement was no longer needed. This self-regulating system shows how collective rationality can obtain without the actors intending it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prospects for the spontaneous emergence of cooperation in n-person prisoner's dilemmas are studied within an evolutionary framework. Both purely cooperative regimes and states representing a mix of conditionally cooperative with noncooperative strategies turn out to be possible outcomes of the selection process, but only the latter correspond to evolutionarily stable strategies. Two-person games differ qualitatively from games with three or more players in that they are more propitious to cooperative regimes. Spontaneous cooperation in general collective-action games therefore appears less likely than much of the recent literature seems to indicate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dense cooperative networks are an essential element of social capital for prosperous societies. These networks enable individuals to overcome collective action dilemmas by enhancing trust. In many biological and social settings, network structures evolve endogenously as agents exit relationships and build new ones. However, the interplay between game strategy and interaction structure by which evolutionary dynamics leads to self-organization of dense cooperative networks has not been understood. Our prisoner's dilemma experiments with exit and partner choice options show that core–periphery segregation of cooperators and defectors drives the emergence of cooperation. Cooperators' Quit-for-Tat and defectors' Roving strategy lead to a highly asymmetric core and periphery structure. Densely connected to each other at the core, cooperators successfully isolate defectors at the periphery and earn larger payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]