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SCOOP: Sustainable Cooperation
We are a transdisciplinary research and training centre studying how to make society more resilient through sustainable cooperation.
In today’s world, working together can be difficult.
At SCOOP, we believe that sustainable cooperation is key to a healthy society. That's why we are investigating how to maintain cooperation over time. SCOOP brings together researchers from five Dutch universities to answer the questions:
- How can we sustain effective cooperation?
- What are the key threats to social resilience?
- And what are the novel solutions to making our communities more caring and inclusive?
Since 2017, SCOOP has been discovering the secrets to making cooperation more sustainable. Our researchers in sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy are developing roadmaps for resilience by studying how societies can maintain high levels of care, work, and inclusion, despite the challenges posed by changing circumstances. Our innovative theoretical model explains not only how sustainable cooperation can be achieved, but also how it breaks down due to vicious cycles, and the unintended side effects in multiple social domains.
Four multidisciplinary work packages
Our transdisciplinary work strategy is divided into four work packages: Care, Inclusion, Work, and Synthesis. We’ve broken with the tradition of focusing on single cooperation domains, because we believe that any intervention aiming to secure sustainable cooperation needs to take into account how other social areas and organisations are impacted.
We are building a transdisciplinary knowledge ecosystem through our Synthesis program, generating a research infrastructure capable of tackling cooperation from multiple disciplinary perspectives. To do this, we’ve developed a multi-method, open access data interface as well as a talent selection and training program to prepare the next generation of top researchers and build the research instruments needed to foster a more resilient society.
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Overview of Challenges and Research Projects
DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS FOR CARE, INCLUSION, AND WORK
The key challenges for societal resilience result from external shocks, spillover, and feedback cycles. These can represent threats to existing cooperative arrangements, but may also provide opportunities to develop novel solutions for care, inclusion, and work. This can be achieved by specifying which individual and societal values need (re-)alignment; understanding the psychological mechanisms that connect individuals through their common identities, goals, and networks; and identifying which institutional provisions and arrangements are needed to address these. The analytical tools are offered by the SCOOP approach, which integrates theoretical insights and links empirical evidence from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives to develop roadmaps for effective policy strategies and solutions. The proposed research is organized in four Work Packages (WPs, see Table).
We use this approach to address twelve specific challenges. Nine of them connect the three sustainability threats to specific cooperation outcomes relevant to the provision of care (WP1), inclusion (WP2), and work (WP3). Three of them link these threats to general theoretical challenges and will be elaborated in WP4 (see Table). For each of these challenges, we define a key hypothesis that connects individual level psychological processes to the occurrence of value (in-) compatibilities and historically documented long-term effects, and examine how these differ across specific contexts. We specify relevant ideals, mechanisms, and institutions, and empirically test the validity of this integrated analysis by triangulating disciplinary approaches and methodologies, including tests of intervention effectiveness.
To find out more about the work package and challenges, click on the work package (WP)
To find out more about the research projects per work package, click on the challenge
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Overview of challenges and research projects
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External Shocks
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Spillovers
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Feedbacks
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WP1: Care
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1. Reshaping Care
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2. Facilitating Work-Life Balance
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3. Creating Caring Communities
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WP2: Inclusion
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4. Accomodating Newcomers
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5. Connecting Communities
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6. Dealing with Diversity
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WP3: Work
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7. Reshaping Organizatinal Forms
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8. Reconfiguring Roles & Relations
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9. Reconciling Stakeholder Interests
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WP4: Synthesis
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10. Network Co-Evolution
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11. Identity Flexibility
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12. Shared Responsibility
