How do people survive under extreme conditions? Will selfish, non-cooperating free-rider types – the solo players – have the best chances of surviving? Or would cooperating, hard-working types – the team players – have higher chances? All morale put aside, it is interesting to know whether non-cooperation or cooperation pays off in a game characterized by scarcity and hard competition for survival. A study of people in such a Hobbesian state of nature can also teach us important lessons about social (...) dynamics in contemporary, prosperous societies. An interesting case of ‘The survival game’ can be found in Solzhenitsyn’s (1963 [1962]) self-biographical book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting life in a Soviet Gulag prison camp in Siberia January 1951. We use Solzhenitsyn’s work as evidence of the interplay between five player types among prisoners: Cooperative blind-riders (BRs), hard-riders (HRs) and tough-riders (TRs), i.e. the so-called ‘toilers’; non-cooperative easy-riders (ERs), looked upon by the toilers as ‘bastards’, ‘screws’ and ‘errand boys’; and finally Low-riders (LRs), comprising ‘goners’ and ‘jackals’. The main research question addresses the successfulness of the survival strategies of the five player types. Apart from a Multiple Player Approach (MPA) that may be seen as a further development of second-generation theory of collective action (Ostrom & Ahn, 2009), we apply Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory on our case. Hence, we argue that impression management at two different ‘stages’ – the Brigade stage and the Camp stage – is crucial for survival for hard-riding as well as for easy-riding players, in particular strategic masking. Seeking to unite Goffman and game-theoretic MPA, our overall purpose is to make a theoretical contribution to “game-related sociology” (Swedberg, 2001). (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the development of a “third-generation” rational choice theory by introducing a Multiple Player Approach for analysing collective action problems. Drawing on the foundational first and second generation works of Olson (The logic of collective action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965) and Ostrom (Scand Polit Stud 23(1):3–16), we introduce five player types that we believe capture essential empirical features of many real world collective action problems: Blind Riders, Tough Riders, Hard Riders, Easy Riders, and Low (...) Riders. We consider the complex interaction and dynamics that unfold among them. The main novelty of the analysis is to draw attention to the need for active societal support to effectively empower and reward hard riders for resolving collective action problems, particularly when facing external shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic, Brexit, and financial crises. (shrink)

Social capital, measured as the level of trustamong people, may be regarded as a newproduction factor alongside the traditionalones of human and physical capital. Withappropriate levels of social capital,monitoring and transaction costs can be savedand thus economic growth stimulated. Vialinking social capital to rural development andcomparing the cases of agricultural cooperativemovements in Denmark and Poland, this paperidentifies possible roots of building socialcapital and suggests that social capital wasbuilt through a lengthy process in bothcountries during the 19th century. However,the comparison of (...) the present level of socialcapital indicates that the level of socialcapital is significantly higher in Denmark thanin Poland. The paper concludes that the reasonfor this difference is the fact that theoriginal accumulation of social capital inPoland was destroyed by the communist regime. (shrink)