1 - What Is Co-Operative Action, and Why Is It Important?

Summary

A set of unique practices for the construction of action underlie many diverse forms of human social and cognitive life: language, social organization, tools, pedagogy, sharing experience, the progressive differentiation of human societies and cultural worlds, etc. New action is built by decomposing, and reusing with transformation the resources made available by the earlier actions of others. We thus inhabit each other’s actions. Such co-operative action differs from cooperation in that it is not restricted to mutual aid; more crucially it provides, in the midst of action itself, a systematic mechanism for progressive accumulation with modification on all scales, from chains of local utterances, through tools, to the unfolding differentiation through time of human social groups. After introducing co-operative action, an overview of the book’s sections and chapters is given, followed by the conventions used for transcription.