Cooperative Research in the National Marine Fisheries Service


Book Description

In recent years there has been growing interest in having fisheries stakeholders involved in various aspects of fisheries data collection and experimentation. This activity is generally known as cooperative research and may take many forms, including gear technology studies, bycatch avoidance studies, and surveys. While the process is not new, the current interest in cooperative research and the growing frequency of direct budgetary allocation for cooperative research prompted this report. Cooperative Research in the National Marine Fisheries Service addresses issues essential for the effective design and implementation of cooperative and collaborative research programs.




Managing the Industry/university Cooperative Research Center


Book Description

Over the past several decades, industry-university cooperative research centers have revolutionized the way firms and universities interact with each other. Today, over 70 percent of industry-sponsored research is conducted within these centers. This book provides practical guidance on how to manage these linkage mechanisms. The editors and authors address every critical aspect of center management from start-up through technology transfer to succession planning. Every stakeholder group involved in these centers, including faculty, university administrators, industrial representatives, and government officials will benefit from the experience and evaluation-based strategies and best practices covered in each chapter.




Cooperative Research and Development: The Industry—University—Government Relationship


Book Description

We must all hang together or surely we will all hang separately. Benjamin Franklin The significant apathy that characterized relationships between indus try and universities and the adversarial nature of relationships between industry and government have both faded rapidly in the 1980s as the realities of global competition have surfaced in the United States. Both industry and government leaders articulate a number of constructs for regaining our competitiveness in world markets. One of the more fre quent strategies prescribed in this new competitiveness era is cooperation. Different individuals or groups may espouse different definitions, inter pretations, or areas of emphasis, but the overall importance of this concept is substantial. Although examples of cooperative research have existed for several decades, the number and variety of relationships have expanded rapidly in the 1980s as corporations, universities, and governments have embraced this strategy. Joint ventures involving two or three firms increased from under 200 per year in the 1970s to over 400 per year by the mid-1980s. Multiple-firm cooperative arrangements are a more recent phenomenon, made possible by the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984. By mid- 1988,81 of these industry-level consortia had formed under the provisions of the 1984 Act. The rapid growth in cooperative research and development (R&D) is primarily a response to the pressures of international competition. As a corporate strategy, cooperative R&D meets short-term needs for assets to implement new approaches for coping with intensifying competition.




Co-Operative Inquiry


Book Description

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of co-operative inquiry: a way of doing research with people where the roles of researcher and subject are integrated. Co-operative inquiry is a distinctive and wide-ranging form of participative research in which people use the full range of their sensibilities to inquire together into any aspect of the human condition. This book offers both an extensive exploration of its theoretical background and a detailed practical guide to the methods involved. Topics covered include: a critique of established research techniques; the underlying participative paradigm of co-operative inquiry; the epistemological and political aspects of participation; different types of co-operative inquiry and the range of inquiry topics; ways of setting up inquiry groups and enabling their development; four kinds of inquiry outcome and the primacy of the practical; the main stages of the inquiry cycle, highlighting key issues for practice at each stage; and special skills and procedures used for enhancing validity.




Collective Courage


Book Description

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.




The Cooperative Enterprise


Book Description

This book presents a study of cooperatives as a two-layer entrepreneurial model, and analyzes cooperative enterprises. Above all, it explores how inducements (from the firm) and contributions (from its members, in their respective roles) are aligned, and seeks to answer the question of what this means for managing each cooperative as a firm as well as a group. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which begins with an analysis of specific aspects of cooperative enterprises, with a focus on the added value of cooperation, the weighing of interests, and a behavioral perspective on the imminent communities and their goals. In a structured approach, the book examines the various facets of relationships in cooperatives on a transactional, financial and control level. Further, a case study on the Dutch cooperative Rabobank illustrates what happens when members fail. In turn, part two concentrates on integrating the lessons learned with the existing economic literature on cooperatives, so as to contribute to a theory of cooperative management. Finally, the book links the theoretical approach to practice: in the third part, it reports on the outcomes of using a computerized simulation game to show members of cooperatives how to manage their business and the cooperative business at the same time, enabling them to understand and actively practice two-level entrepreneurship.




Agricultural Cooperative Management and Policy


Book Description

This book focuses on the use of farm level, micro- and macro-data of cooperative systems and networks in developing new robust, reliable and coherent modeling tools for agricultural and environmental policy analysis. The efficacy of public intervention on agriculture is largely determined by the existence of reliable information on the effects of policy options and market developments on farmers' production decisions and in particular, on key issues such as levels of agricultural and non-agricultural output, land use and incomes, use of natural resources, sustainable-centric management, structural change and the viability of family farms. Over the last years, several methods and analytical tools have been developed for policy analysis using various sets of data. Such methods have been based on integrated approaches in an effort to investigate the above key issues and have thus attempted to offer a powerful environment for decision making, particularly in an era of radical change for both agriculture and the wider economy.




Cooperative Innovation: Science And Technology Policy


Book Description

Research cooperation in a nation is a fundamental key to national competitiveness in technology that supports growth in a national economy. To fully understand why some nations are more successful in innovation than others, one must examine the structure and process of knowledge creation and use — the Science & Technology policy of a nation.National innovation requires progress both in Science & Technology, and also in economy. Research cooperation for innovation is necessary, since science, technology, and production are performed in different sectors of a nation. Universities conduct research science, and science discovers nature. Governments support most of the research in universities, and therefore are the principal sponsors of science. Industry develops most technology and commercializes technology into economically useful products/services. The structure and process of knowledge in a nation thus requires (1) creation of knowledge in science, (2) translation of science into technology, and (3) design of technology into commercialization of utility. At a national level, innovation is thus a complicated concept — proposing a need to identify the proper ways that government-university-industry can cooperate to advance knowledge and economically benefit from innovation. Special programs in Science & Technology policy that have proven beneficial in fostering research cooperation for national competitiveness will be covered in this book.Cooperative Innovation: Science & Technology Policy helps readers understand a practical science & technology policy for a nation. Its contents are particularly useful for government administrators of research, industrial research directors, university research directors, and students of science & technology policy.




Co-operative Management of Local Fisheries


Book Description

This book is the first to consolidate information on the different routes by which these co-operative management arrangements have evolved. The authors include anthropologists, environmental planners, biologists, economists, fishery managers and tribal and governmental leaders. Their contributions examine the process of achieving co-management, the institutions created by co-management arrangements, and the benefits which result. Some of these benefits include more efficient and equitable management, less conflict between government and fishermen, and better co-operation between groups of fishermen. Co-operative Management of Local Fisheries looks at successes and failures of these arrangements for shared decision-making and offers guidelines for viable co-operative management.




Frontier Information Technology and Systems Research in Cooperative Economics


Book Description

This book is the very first book-length study devoted to the advances in technological development and systems research in cooperative economics. The chapters provide, first of all, a coherent framework for understanding and applying the concepts and approaches of complexity and systems science for the advanced study of cooperative networks and particular cooperative enterprises and communities. Second, the book serves as a unique source of reliable information on the frontier information technologies available for the production, consumer, credit, and agricultural cooperative enterprises, discussing predominant strategies, potential drivers of change, and responses to complex problems. Given the diverse range of backgrounds and advanced research results, researchers, decision-makers, and stakeholders from all fields of cooperative economics in any country of the world will undoubtedly benefit from this book.