Popular participation in social change: Cooperatives, collectives, and nationalized industry

For those who still think of anthropology as a discinpline concerned primarily with small traditional communities and exotic cultures, this book wil be a way station. Few if any of the worldwide group of active anthropologists in its scenario would shy away from problems of the industrialized and economically interrelated world. The present volume, however, deals mainly with grass-roots people as they operate in the larger society. Cooperatives, as the editors point out in their masterful introduction, are communities of a special sort which show how people direct themselves to form, out of the same old human material, new institutions to cope with their changing world.