Question

Collaborative behavior, however, is also possible without institutions. Discuss in a brief paragraph or two how collaboration can happen without the coordinating effect of institutions?

Answer 1

Collaborative behaviour springs from grearious instinct of the human being. It has been in existence since before the rise of institutions and is one of the binding forces for formation of a successful society. Living together needs a certain minimum collaborative behaviour among the members. The best example of collaborative behaviour without formal institution is peer to peer production. The process is one-step, meaning the user accesses some or part of an original file from a P2P community website, modifies or enhances the file in some way, and then submits the modified file back into the community. The peers need to collaborate with each other and share the work in a proper way to manage this. Thus, it needs a high degree of collaboration which is usually done by the peers themselves. Other examples are people helping each other voluntarily during natural disasters, people interacting on a social media platform and coordinating an event, etc.

Consider the above three examples of collaborative behaviour without coordinating effect of institutions. It is clear that for collaboration to exist, the following factors are necessary:

1) Mutual trust among members

2) Mentality to help

3) Common objective

As we could see, there are all the three factors in the examples given above. Infact, institutions do not 'create' collaboration, they simply 'manage' collaboration. The greatest leaders set a common objective for their followers and generate a sense of unity among them, so they work collaboratively towards it even without the leader managing it . The best example of this fact was Mahatma Gandhi. He set a common objective of independance for India and promoted the principle of equality. This led to large masses of people coming together and working towards independance in a highly collaborative way even when formal leadership way not available.

In summary, we could say that collaborative behaviour is a natural tendency of human being does not necessarily need the guiding effect of an institution. Collaborative behaviour naturally occurs where there is mutual trust, mentality to help, and a common objective.