Neighbors inhabit a distinct social sphere whose regulative ideal is the democracy of everyday life. Its chief elements are reciprocity and a practical disregard for the differences and inequalities that shape interactions in the broader society and in democratic politics. The democracy of everyday life has heightened significance during disasters. Neighbors hold our lives in their hands. But COVID-19 differs from physical disasters in ways that alter neighbor interactions. Contamination makes relations more fearful at the same time that isolation makes them more valuable. When the meaning attributed to the virus is not shared experience of disease and mortality but rabid partisanship, neighbor relations become distorted. This degradation of the democracy of everyday life signals that democracy itself is imperiled more deeply than political paralysis, corruption, and institutional failure suggest.

The proliferation of volunteering for development (V4D) models, approaches and funding sources means V4D is no longer able to be neatly located within the third sector. The enormous diversity of interactions within the Youth V4D (YV4D) field provides an opportunity to examine new and different activities and trajectories to ascertain the extent to which the traditional values of V4D, reciprocity and solidarity continue to form part of YV4D. Using the classical third sector model of Evers and Laville (The third sector in Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2004), and drawing on Polanyi (The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001 [1944]) and Mauss (The gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, Routledge, London, 1990 [1925]), in particular their concepts of redistribution and reciprocity, we present three case studies of new hybrid YV4D trajectories—university YV4D, state YV4D programmes, and volunteer tourism/voluntourism—to reveal the different logics and features of contemporary YV4D. We argue that understanding these contemporary YV4D trajectories requires a focus on organisational and stakeholder structures of diverse volunteering activities, their relational logics and the forms of reciprocity they involve. We find that in the YV4D case studies we explore the neoliberal market logic of exchange, along with political ideologies and state interests, affects the YV4D model design.

This study suggests that the expectation of an individual about the outcome of their charitable donating can guide their action. Based on reciprocity theory and research, outcome expectation was dichotomized as altruistic versus egoistic, and an expectation-based psychological model of giving has been proposed. In this model, expectation leads to trust in charities, manifesting in strengthened engagement, which in its turn generates an increased amount of donations. In addition, social status moderates the effect of outcome expectation on charitable commitment. Overall, the proposed model was supported by the results of 530 responses of an online survey. Furthermore, social status moderated only the effect of egoistic expectation on charitable commitment. This indicated a stronger positive relationship between egoistic expectation and commitment for individuals of low social status than for those of high social status.

In recent years, nonprofit scholars have increasingly studied the phenomenon of social enterprises which has become a generic term describing a wider reorientation among third sector organizations. The emergence of social enterprises has also led to a dynamic of hybridization and broadening in the cooperative sector, similar to an earlier dynamic of “economization”, but this time on the other end of the organizational spectrum. This paper aims at developing a fine-grained conceptual understanding of how this organizational dynamic is shaped in terms of member coordination, thus contributing to a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of different organizational forms of cooperatives. Specifically, to highlight the difference to traditional member-focused cooperatives, the paper introduces the term third-party-focused cooperatives for those social enterprises which emphasize economic goals as well as control and ownership by a particular community (typically place-based). The key result of the paper is that with the shift from member- to community-focus in cooperatives, the main coordination mechanism becomes one of norm-based trust on the basis of generalized reciprocity. In contrast to traditional maxim-based trust member coordination on the basis of relation-specific reciprocity, this enables third-party-focused cooperatives to mobilize bridging and linking social capital, facilitating collective action aimed towards the community interest. The findings suggest that this identity shift requires a mutual re-positioning between the cooperative and the nonprofit sector, in terms of umbrellas as well as regulatory and legislative bodies.

In Julia Maskivker’s recent “Justice and Contribution,” she argues that, under normal circumstances, the failure to guarantee that life-sustaining workers are above the non-struggle point is not merely disrespectful and a failure of beneficence, but a violation of the norms of fair play and, as such, a “low blow.” In this article, I offer a critical reply to Maskivker. I begin by explaining her reasoning. Then I turn to critique, focusing on two key weaknesses and, in so doing, drawing out two larger lessons.

This article addresses two objections by Samuel Kahn to my argument for a living wage for life-sustaining workers. First, it refutes the charge that my position is patronising for asserting that low wages impede a worker’s ability to thrive. Second, it responds to a challenge regarding the claim that individuals have a right to a monetary equivalent of their fair share of natural resources, and that this right can be used to determine the justice of a life-sustaining worker’s situation in modern society.

We present and test a model of reciprocity in which people are more likely to repay good treatment to the extent they judge it as motivated by true caring rather than tactical self-interest. The model’s key contributions stem from how it handles ambiguously motivated behavior. It allows people to maintain divergent hypotheses: They can view behavior as driven by caring, self-interest, or a mix thereof. In contrast, previous analyses resolve rather than maintain ambiguity. They treat caring and self-interest as mutually exclusive hypotheses, and require that people commit to one and dismiss the other. By more realistically handling ambiguity, our model yields three benefits. First, it accommodates intuitive patterns of play that existing analyses do not and which we experimentally corroborate. These patterns reflect intermediate inclinations to reciprocate ambiguously motivated positive behavior. Second, it challenges conventional interpretations of long-studied phenomena, including unraveling in finitely iterated prisoners’ dilemmas, substantial offers in ultimatum games, and gift exchange. Third, it highlights how diversity in perceptions – the same action can appear generous to one person and miserly to another – is empirically consequential. Under conventional interpretations and without accounting for diverse perceptions, the aforementioned phenomena have been viewed as inconsistent with a taste for repaying good treatment. Our model shows that they are entirely consistent with a nuanced form of this taste: a desire to repay good treatment that seems to largely reflect genuine caring.

The money-burning game (MBG) is widely used to study anti-social or destructive behavior. We extend the design of the MBG to separate three motives that could lead subjects to burn their partner’s money – spite, reciprocity, and inequality aversion. We detect that reciprocity is the dominant reason: Most of our subjects would only burn their partner’s money if they believed that their partner would burn theirs. This finding has important implications for the interpretation of the behavior of the game.

A key issue in the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments is jurisdiction, with a distinction drawn between ‘direct’ jurisdictional rules, which are applied by the court of origin at the time of initial adjudication, and ‘indirect’ rules applied by a court at the recognition and enforcement stage. While some commentators and national laws suggest that no jurisdictional ‘gap’ should exist between direct and indirect rules, in this article it is contended that, outside the context of a federal system or international convention with uniform rules, no compelling justification exists for eliminating the gap.

This article examines the feasibility of enforcing Singapore money judgments in Cambodia, focusing on the “guarantee of reciprocity” – an ambiguous yet critical condition. It is ambiguous because Cambodian courts have not yet interpreted it. It is critical because it is perceived as the main obstacle to enforcing foreign judgments. Without a treaty-based mutual enforcement mechanism between Cambodia and Singapore, it is unclear whether a Singapore money judgment could be enforced in Cambodia or if a judgment creditor’s application would be dismissed in any event citing lack of reciprocity. Following an analysis of the laws of Cambodia, Singapore, and Japan, the article concludes that there is no legal obstacle before the Cambodian courts to enforce a Singapore money judgment. The flexible interpretation of the guarantee of reciprocity outlined in this article would enhance access to justice, eliminate a trade barrier, and make the investment environment more attractive in Cambodia.

Using public goods games in a laboratory setting, we study team-level production, where two teams compete for the resources of a common-member who can benefit from and provide effort in both teams. Intrinsically, the common-member faces divided loyalties. We examine such competition in a setting in which the common-member has productive abilities equal to that of the other team members (dedicated-members), and in two settings where he/she has greater relative potential. When effort (contributions) by the common-member have greater productivity (coupled with higher opportunity costs to contribute) in providing the public good relative to that of dedicated-members, we find team performance is not significantly increased. On the other hand, when the common-member has a greater endowment, sufficient to match the absolute contributions of team members in both teams, there is a significant increase in team performance. The evidence suggests that a norm of reciprocity by dedicated-members based on absolute contributions of the common-member better explains behavior than a norm based on the value added of the common-member's contributions. This behavior, along with fairness norms elicited in a survey, suggests that on average dedicated members do not sufficiently incorporate the common-members' higher opportunity costs in the treatment where his/her productivity is increased. This setting provides an important illustration of where the behavioral response to the type of inequality matters, leading to differences in team efficiency.