Paul deLespinasse: Coopetition: An important, badly needed new word
Several times during my career, I found it useful to invent new words pointing to important ideas for which no words existed. Perhaps the most important new word — "coopetition" — was actually invented for me over 40 years ago by Doug Chamberlin, one of my undergraduate students at Adrian College.
In class, I invited students to come up with a new word to go with the following definition: conflict over how to divide up the benefits produced by cooperation.
Doug only took about a minute to suggest "coopetition," which was so obviously the right word that I "bought" it on the spot! The word combined cooperation and conflict ("competition") in exactly the right order, as it turned out. (Later, someone else invented the same word with a different, and in my opinion incoherent, meaning. But Doug Chamberlin and I had it first!)
Why did we need this word? It turns out that coopetition is a fundamental process in the voluntary associations that are such important parts of our lives.
Coopetition, for example, is very helpful in understanding the complicated relationship between employers and workers. I first felt the need for this concept during my 1970-1971 sabbatical at Harvard Law School. Attending Archibald Cox's excellent labor law course, I noticed that conflict over how to divide up the benefits produced by cooperation was a vital part of labor-management relations.
The class textbook, by the way, was written by Cox himself together with Derek Bok, dean of the law school and later Harvard's president.
We tend to think of labor-management relations as reflecting fundamental conflict. After all, workers always want higher wages, and employers always seek to minimize labor costs. Strikes usually take place because management and labor are unable to agree on working conditions and the level of compensation for the workers. This conflict between management and labor is what gets in the news.
But the news does not report an important fact about the circumstances within which this conflict takes place: Both parties to this conflict have a mutual interest in cooperating.
An economic conflict thus does exist, but it is not fundamental. The employment relationship is created by the mutual consent of worker and employer, and mutual consent will not exist unless both parties expect to benefit.
And both can benefit, since the total production of several people working together is often more than the sum of what the same people could produce working independently. For example: several people, none of whom could move a heavy piano, can move it by cooperating. More generally, cooperative production allows for workers to specialize, long recognized as a key to higher productivity.
Conflict arises over the allocation of the extra value created by cooperation.
It is therefore misleading to speak only of a conflict between parties to voluntary associations including the employment relation. The very occasion for their conflict is created by the fact that they have a mutual interest in cooperating. Without their cooperation, there would be no additional production, above and beyond what they could produce working strictly as individuals, and it is the distribution of this increment that their conflict is all about.
Unfortunately, people tend to take the mutuality of interest for granted and to focus all their attention on the subsidiary conflict over how to divide up the benefits produced by cooperating, thus getting a distorted view of voluntary associations.
Marxist theory, which assumes a huge conflict of interest between workers and capitalists, takes advantage of and accentuates this distorted perspective.
It is my hope that adding coopetition — as Doug and I defined it — to our vocabulary will help us think more clearly about the voluntary associations which are critically important parts of our lives.
— Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political science and computer science at Adrian College. He can be reached at pdeles@proaxis.com.
This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Paul deLespinasse: Coopetition: An important, badly needed new word
