Decision-Making for Collective Organizing in Community Contexts

Communities as groups of people and organizations with shared resources and common goals present a microcosm of highly interactive behavioral mechanisms. While communities share intrinsic motivation towards common goals, how different community actors prioritize and pursue those goals varies greatly. For example, individualism and global developments may trump trust and reciprocity, which creates tensions that are rich to study. In this symposium, we present recent works that examine phenomena related to decision-making for collective organizing in different community contexts, whereby we focus on community members and organizatons located in geographically bounded territories. Taking a behavioral perspective, we address several questions related to how different community actors, both on individual and organizational levels, make decisions that have an impact on the social and economic life of the communities. For example, how do information infrastructures affect the individual decision-making regarding the usage of resource commons under resource scarcity? How do interventions lead to the emergence of new organizations within communities that spur economic development? How do community actors define and pursue multiple, potentially conflicting, goals? Last, we critically discuss, how the strength of community's worldviews affect the performance of local organizations and the development of the communities. Collaborating on natural resource commons Author: Dorthe Doejbak Haakonsson; Aarhus U. Author: Alexandra Valencia Zapata; Aarhus U., Department of Management Author: Erik Reimer Larsen; Aarhus U. Promoting urban development via polycentric governance: the case of Favelas Author: Daphne Quintella Coelho Dutra; Daphne Coelho The community logic as a resource and a constraint: its effects on financial performance Author: Stephen Smulowitz; Wake Forest U. Multiple-goal achievement in fragile ecosystems: how community leaders in the Colombian Pacific Author: Zorica Zagorac-Uremovic; ETH Zürich Author: Ivan Dario Lobo Romero; U. de los Andes