Varieties of Cooperation

This volume conceives cooperation in broad terms as any form of mutual making, in which goals, means, and procedures are seen as ongoing accomplishments. From the exchanges of goods or information, to the interactions between bodies or organizations, and the coordination between colleagues, competitors, friends or foes. Mutually making the conditions of mutual making entails translating heterogeneous interests, negotiating conflicting values and articulating distributed activities. On the one hand, the contributions cover different notions and concepts of cooperation in diverse fields of study: from the mundane cooperation of everyday life to collective endeavors within specific domains. On the other hand, the contributions share a focus on the practices of making cooperation possible through cooperatively creating the conditions for cooperation itself. Seeing cooperative media both as a condition and consequence of cooperation, the volume sheds light on a general feature of media, technologies and instruments that both enable and constrain the collaboration between heterogeneous social worlds, with and without consensus.

Ehler Voss is an anthropologist at the University of Siegen.