Cooperation

Any symbiotic relationship can be seen as a cooperation through which the several observed systems perform mutually beneficial work. Thus, living entities are said to cooperate when they behave in a manner that can be described as functionally interdependent. The incidental phonetic relationship between “cooperation” and “corporation” is significant in this regard, for corporation comes from the Latin word corpus, or body, and cooperating entities divide labor in much the way that a body does.

Cooperation can also take this form among human beings who can, unreflectively, perform tasks that work to their several benefits, much as the flower does not know its role in making honey for the bee, and the bee does not know that it is pollinating flowers. A great part of social life takes place at this prereflective, yet cooperative level. For example, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith provides an incomplete list of those who must cooperate to make a cheap woolen coat, including “the shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the woolcomber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser,” and he goes on to illustrate how a cooperative of 10 people is 200 to 4,000 times as efficient as 10 people working in isolation. The high levels of productivity in social life are thus largely the result of unnoticed, cooperative labor, which can be realized by looking at one's shoes, dinner, or reading surface; if all the tasks and equipment involved had to be personally made and handled, all of these combined elements could not be obtained by a person working alone, even in a lifetime of effort.

Nevertheless, not all cooperation goes unnoticed or unintended. Where individuals deliberately cooperate, cooperation is more distinctly human and approaches mutuality, which is Erik Erikson's ideal for human coinvolvement.