Obtain Immediately Co-Operation In Many Lands, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) Narrated By Lionel Smith-Gordon Presented In Visual Format
from CoOperation in Many Lands, Vol,
HE task which we have set ourselves is to study a form of economic organisation which is termed cooperation.
The word is used in ordinary speech in several senses, People are said to cooperate or work together to secure, let us say, a legislative reform or some other desired end.
But the sense in which the term is used by economists is a narrower one, restricted to a special form of economic organisation in which people work together for definite business purposes under certain definite business rules.
Before we consider what special meaning is given to this use of the word cooperation we may profitably ask ourselves something about the part which association plays in industry and commerce.
We are accustomed, in ordinary life, to think of the principle of competition rather than that of association as being the underlying principle of the modern industrial structure.
Most of the earlier economists indeed gave a certain authority to this view, But when we examine the working of our industrial system we cannot fail to perceive that competition is not really its essential foundation.
Competition there is, and we must not lose sight of the part which it plays but it only begins after the principle of association has had full play.
We have only to picture tocompeting Robinson Crusoes woulcl achieve, and to compare it with our own, to see that it is a necessary condition of industrial or business efficiency that men should work together.
Our banks and our railways compete with each other but they maintain clearinghouses to facilitate their joint working, In like manner the whole.
Industrial system is associative as well as competitive, It is not, therefore, the mere fact that the special subject of which we treat involves association that makes it necessary to study it as a subject of descriptive economics.
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