The community cooperatives that are spreading today in many parts of the world are the arrival point of an evolutionary process that has seen the progressive shift of cooperatives' focus from specific social and professional groups to society as a whole. This evolution is marked by two changes. The first was at the turn of the 19th century when there made their appearance the first community cooperatives which catered to the needs of a whole community. Among them were electric cooperatives, cooperative banks and some kinds of agricultural cooperatives. A further development relevant to the evolution of community cooperatives occurred towards the end of the last century with the enlargement of cooperatives' aims to embrace society's benefit. From this process there emerge in total four categories of cooperatives which taken together constitute a complete classification of the cooperative universe. New community cooperatives are the off-springs of the old ones but the picture is rather confused. The term itself is relatively new and similar institutions are named differently at different times. Moreover, though having a few basic features in common, they differ much from one another and from the old ones. To take care of this we elaborate a concept of community cooperative consistent with its evolution and the classification of cooperatives we have identified. Basic elements of the concept are community goods, territory and citizenship, which are discussed extensively with reference to factual cases. We then discuss in what way new community cooperatives differ from old ones. The paper closes with a discussion of their future prospects.

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The community co-operatives that are spreading today in many parts of the world are the arrival point of an evolutionary process that has seen the progressive shift of co-operatives’ focus from specific social and professional groups to society as a whole. Since the term ‘community co-operative’ is relatively new and similar institutions are named differently at different times, the first task is to elucidate the concept. Its basic elements are community goods, territory, and citizenship, which are discussed with reference to factual cases. We then discuss differences between new community co-operatives and old ones. In the second part we review some data about them, with a special focus on customer-owned providers of public services. The chapter closes with a discussion of the economic reasons why citizen participation through consumer ownership this organizational mode is more likely to expand today in response to privatization failures than it did in the past.

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This paper contrasts assignments to punitive tasks and terminations as alternative incentive devices. The basic question we ask here is: does the threat of assigning employees to a punitive task allow one to attain higher effort levels than termination threats? The answer critically depends on whether employers are able or not to commit themselves not to fire. We show that in the no‐commitment case the only relevant incentive device is termination threats. In contrast, when employers commit themselves not to fire, by threatening punitive task reassignments there obtain effort levels that are not implementable by termination. The implementation results are then applied to the study of incentive problems arising when investment infirm‐specific human capital is unverifiable.