scholarly journals Conflict analysis in collective decision making at a watershed level: a case study from Morocco

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Al-Saidi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Conflict Analysis ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making

Member preference heterogeneity and system-lifeworld dichotomy in cooperatives

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 1063-1080 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantine Iliopoulos ◽  
Vladislav Valentinov
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Preference Heterogeneity ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Agricultural Cooperative ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
Double Nature

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the issue of preference heterogeneity in cooperatives. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on the ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, this paper interprets preference heterogeneity of cooperative members in terms of the precarious relationship between the categories of “system” and “lifeworld.” The argument is buttressed with a case study of an agricultural cooperative recently founded in Central Greece. Findings The sensitivity of cooperatives to the lifeworld contexts of their members exacts the price in the form of the member preference heterogeneity problem. If this sensitivity is taken to be the constitutive characteristic of cooperatives, then the proposed argument hammers home their fundamental ambivalence, as they are necessarily fraught with the potential for internal conflict. Research limitations/implications The paper urges for a radical rethinking of Georg Draheim’s thesis of the “double nature” of cooperatives. “Double nature” is shown to aggravate the member preference heterogeneity problem. Practical implications The results of this study inform the cooperative leaders’ quest to strike a balance between the interests of their members and the demands of the external socio-economic environment. Originality/value This research contributes significantly to the literature on collective decision-making costs incurred by cooperatives. The failure of cooperatives to balance the sensitivity to members’ interests and to the external environment is exposed as the root cause of the divergence and heterogeneity of member preferences. This heterogeneity is shown to boost collective decision-making costs.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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