The Cooperative Economy: A Solution to Societal Grand Challenges

Society faces significant grand challenges, such as wealth and economic inequality, Big Tech dominance, loss of privacy, and overconsumption. This book proposes a new economic system, the cooperative economy, that promotes ethical community-driven exchange and addresses these issues through design principles that prioritize self-sufficiency, sustainability, and economic equality. It is a valuable resource for policymakers, managers, scholars, and students interested in finding solutions to these complex challenges.

Format: Hardback
Length: 268 pages
Publication date: 06 February 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Society faces numerous grand challenges that have profound impacts on humanity. These challenges include the concentration of wealth and economic inequality, the dominance of Big Tech firms, the loss of privacy and free choice, and the overconsumption and abuse of natural resources. Globalization has exacerbated these issues, reinforcing their effects. Traditional regulation, legislation, international treaties, and government and corporate policies have fallen short of providing sufficient remedies.

In response to these challenges, this book offers a bold solution: a new economic system that is free from the design flaws that have contributed to these societal grand challenges. The proposed cooperative economy is an ethical community-driven exchange system that relies on collective action to promote societal values while accounting for resource constraints.

Unlike the modern economic system that is predominantly driven by opportunistic behavior, the cooperative economy moves away from a materialistic orientation and follows a more balanced perspective that leverages prosocial behavior. The book explains how this new system adopts design principles that promote self-sufficiency of communities, sustainability, and entrepreneurship while limiting overconsumption and excessive profit-making. It enhances economic equality by leveraging price subsidization and by restricting salary differences.

The book describes how the system serves the interests of consumers, vendors, and employees while preventing the accumulation of power by the platform owner who operates this system. This book is invaluable reading for policymakers who have been searching for solutions to some of the grand challenges that our society faces, and for managers who have sought alternative ways to cope with platform ecosystems, resource shortages, and sup.

Weight: 684g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032370699