Cooperation and Collective Good in a Residential Complex
Subject Areas : Urban Sociological Studies
Keywords: Grounded Theory, Fragile cooperation, common good, Mashad city,
Abstract :
It is difficult to live in a residential complex without cooperation and organizing collective action. Ignoring the importance of cooperation deactivates the effects of small and scattered investments of the residents, wastes small endeavors and collective assets and brings about an unsecure environment for individuals. As a result, it has been attempted to investigate residents’ perceptions of cooperation and its components through Grounded theory and interviewing residential complexes’ residents in Mashad city. Thus, Laleh residential compex was studied in the present research from different aspects and angels. Therefore, 35 semi- structured interviews were carried out. On the basis of the analysis of findings within the research paradigm, it was found that fragile cooperation constituted the core. Constraining structure was presented as the underlying conditions. The structures people may be able to influence but they have no control over them. Individual charactersitics such cooperation evasion, interactional gap, negativitism, and weak central control are among the causal conditions that lead to “ fragile cooperation ”. The consequences of such interactions is that even if clear norms and rules prevail in the complex and that there is a descipline in the complex, these conditions are very unstable. And in case there are few number of free riders, the mentioned common good can be easily lost.