Orchestrators of coordination: Towards a new role of the state in coordinated capitalism?

Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordination. In both cases, the result is decreasing employer coordination. We argue that in CMEs, the state may also play the role of “orchestrator” by supporting the revitalization of employer coordination. It does so through the deployment of ideational and institutional resources that mobilize employers’ associations on a voluntary basis. Applying our framework to a core area of coordinated capitalism, vocational education and training, we show that in both Germany and Switzerland, this indirect and soft form of state intervention was instrumental for turning around their crisis-stricken vocational training systems.

Civil Society as Networks of Issues and Associations: The Case of Food

Scholars usually conceptualize civil society as both a discursive and an associational space. In the former, focus is on communicative practices; in the latter, attention shifts to the actors that cooperate or clash about the identification and production of collective goods. In this chapter, we sketch the contours of an approach to civil society that treats both dimensions in an integrated way. Looking at the role of food issues in urban settings as diverse as Cape Town, Bristol, and Glasgow, we borrow from social network analysis to explore first, how civic organizations combine an interest in food-related issues with attention to other themes, thus defining different, specific agendas; next, we ask if and how interest in food identifies specific clusters of cooperation within broader civil society networks.

Large-scale cooperation in small-scale foraging societies

We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small group interactions. Instead, large scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in the distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.

Community Seed Banks in China: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects

The rich agrobiodiversity of China is under unprecedented threat, experiencing a dramatic loss of many valuable local varieties and wild relatives of main crops. The country's formal conservation system of ex situ genebanks faces serious challenges to address this loss. Community seed banks can play a key role to complement the conservation activities of these genebanks and provide other important collective goods, such as evolutionary services, but although they have been around for some 35 years in various parts of the world, in China they have a much shorter history. In recent years though the number has increased to almost 30 in 2020, in particular due to the efforts of the China Farmers' Seed Network. The community seed banks in the country are very diverse in terms of functions and services, forms of management and institutional linkages. Compared to the most common functions of community seed banks in other countries, China is bringing an important design innovation through two new functions: adding value to seed and produce through innovative marketing strategies, and building regional and national seed system linkages and fostering collaboration. The review of community seed banking not only provides rich empirical evidence, but also makes an important contribution to theory. Building on the achievements of community seed banking in the last decade, there is scope to scale this kind of very valuable agrobiodiversity conservation approach through more effective uptake and support by relevant national policies.

ARTESÃOS DIGITAIS E BENS COLETIVOS LOCAIS NA ECONOMIA DA COLABORAÇÃODIGITAL CRAFTSMANS AND LOCAL COLLECTIVE GOODS IN THE COLLABORATIVE ECONOMY

A tese deste artigo é que a ampliação da economia digital, juntamente com outros fatores, levou a uma expansão das atividades econômicas baseadas na colaboração entre indivíduos e organizações. A proposta é analisar a expansão das atividades econômicas baseadas na colaboração, colocando-as em um continuum regulatório que vai do mercado à reciprocidade generalizada. O artigo trata dessas questões, a partir de uma dupla perspectiva: uma teórica e outra empírica. Na primeira parte, apresentaremos as coordenadas conceituais da economia da colaboração. Na segunda, ilustraremos com os resultados de uma pesquisa sobre a difusão no mundo, e na Europa em particular, dos Laboratórios de Fabricação (Fab Labs). A pesquisa exemplifica os processos de digitalização da economia e uma possível estratégia analítica para estudar a economia da colaboração. Nas conclusões, finalmente, iremos discutir as lições que podem ser extraídas do caso dos Fab Labs.AbstractThe thesis of this article is that the expansion of the digital economy, along with other factors, has led to an expansion of economic activities based on collaboration between individuals and organizations. The proposal is to analyze these collaborative activities, placing them in a regulatory continuum that goes from the market to generalized reciprocity. The article deals with these issues from a double perspective: one theoretical and the other empirical. In the first part, I will present the conceptual coordinates of the collaborative economy. In the second, I will illustrate the results of a piece of research on the diffusion in the world, and in Europe in particular, of Fabrication Laboratories (FabLabs). A study, which exemplifies both the digitalization processes of the economy and a possible analytical strategy for studying the economy of collaboration. In theconclusions, finally, I will discuss the lessons that can be drawn from the case of Fab Labs.

EFFICIENCY OF COLLECTIVE ACTIONS OF BEEF CATTLE PRODUCERS IN THE MIDWEST OF BRAZIL

Contrary to common-sense beliefs that beef cattle producers have difficulties in cooperating among themselves, cooperation initiatives can be noticed in Brazil, especially in the Midwest region. Built on a theoretical framework of Collective Actions and Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), this work analyzes the horizontal cooperation pattern of beef cattle producers in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS). We focused on Private Interest Organizations (PIOs) with the purpose of identifying typologies and analyzing beef collective actions efficiency. Case studies with seven PIOs conducted through semi-structured interviews exhibits the efficiency of these organizations regarding the ability to provide collective goods, which vary according to their organizational aspects and typology. Results points out that PIOs were founded to contribute in technology and professionalization, increasing competitiveness and access to new markets, coordinating productive systems, reducing transaction costs among agents, modifying the institutional environment, and, finally, altering the behavior of bovine meat consumers.