Cooperation

In one line

Cooperation is people working together for a shared end, and it is the process on which every other associative process, and every organisation, is built.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: cooperation is the associative social process in which two or more persons or groups work together in a joint effort to achieve a common objective which they could not achieve, or could not achieve as well, separately. Merrill and Eldredge describe it as the process by which individuals or groups combine their effort, in a more or less organised way, for the attainment of a common objective. It is universal, continuous and, in Kropotkin's phrase adopted by many writers, a condition of survival.

Its essential conditions

Three, and all three must be present.

1. A common objective. Without a shared end there may be coexistence but not cooperation.
2. Awareness of the common objective, and of the need for joint effort. People accidentally producing the same result are not cooperating.
3. Organised effort, however loose, so that the contributions fit together rather than duplicate or obstruct.

The types

By nature of the association.

• Direct cooperation: people do the same work together, at the same time and place, and the doing together is essential. Villagers building an embankment, neighbours putting out a fire, a family harvesting.
• Indirect cooperation: people do different work towards a common end, without needing to be together at all. This is the cooperation created by the division of labour, and it is the form on which a modern economy runs. The farmer, the miller, the transporter and the baker cooperate to feed a city and never meet.

By scale and setting.

• Primary cooperation, in primary groups: the family, the play group, the village. Intimate, personal, an end in itself.
• Secondary cooperation, in secondary groups: the firm, the office, the trade union. Formal, contractual, a means to an end. This is the characteristic form in industrial societies.
• Tertiary cooperation, between groups whose interests are actually opposed, who cooperate for a limited purpose while remaining antagonists: two political parties combining to pass one measure, two competitors agreeing an industry standard. It is deliberately temporary and is sometimes called accommodation in disguise.

Why it happens

The bases of cooperation are usually given as: the desire for personal advantage, since most people achieve more together; mutual and shared needs; altruism and fellow feeling; shared values and beliefs; the necessity imposed by the situation, such as disaster or defence; and the requirements of the division of labour, which makes cooperation unavoidable once specialisation exists.

The interesting theoretical point, and the one that lifts an answer, is that cooperation does not require good will. Indirect cooperation between strangers with no interest in one another is produced by interdependence alone, which is Durkheim's organic solidarity in [Durkheim: Division of Labour and Social Solidarity]. A modern society is held together by cooperation between people who do not know, like or trust one another individually, and that is its distinctive achievement.