We are living through a moment of overlapping crises. Climate change, geopolitical tensions, rising inequality, declining trust in institutions, and growing social fragmentation are unfolding simultaneously. At first glance, these challenges appear unrelated. Yet a closer look reveals a common pattern.
Each reflects a failure of collective performance.
When groups fail to coordinate effectively, the results are pollution nobody controls, organizations that struggle to function, and political systems that lose public trust. Such failures appear across public institutions, private companies, civil society organizations, and international governance. When collective action repeatedly breaks down across so many domains, the problem may lie deeper than any single policy or institution. It may lie in the framework—the paradigm—through which we understand collective performance itself.
In this article, collective performance refers to the capacity of groups—organizations, communities, markets, and societies—to coordinate their actions in ways that produce outcomes that are effective, sustainable, and beneficial over time. When this capacity breaks down, collective action problems emerge across many domains of social and economic life.
This article builds on David Sloan Wilson’s target article, On the Concept of Paradigms and a New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative Systems (2026). Wilson argues that evolutionary theory provides a powerful paradigm for understanding how cooperative groups emerge and evolve. Building on that perspective, the argument developed here extends this paradigm into the domain of economic organization and performance.
At the centre of this extension is the prosocial paradigm, introduced in Performance Management in the Prosocial Market Economy: A New Paradigm for Economic Performance and Sustainability (Pfister et al., 2024). That work develops an approach to redesigning performance management systems to assess and strengthen the conditions that enable cooperation within and between organizations.
The central claim of the prosocial paradigm is that collective performance depends on the quality of relationships within and between groups. When relationships support cooperation, groups perform well. When they undermine cooperation, performance deteriorates.
In this perspective, performance is not primarily a function of individual optimization but of the relational conditions that allow groups to cooperate effectively. The prosocial paradigm, therefore, shifts the analytical focus from a transactional and atomistic view of economic actors toward a relational view in which collective performance emerges from patterns of cooperation.
Rather than treating cooperation as a fortunate by-product of well-functioning organizations, the prosocial paradigm treats it as a central driver of performance that can be deliberately cultivated, assessed, and managed.
Recognizing and strengthening these relational conditions opens the door to what we call a prosocial market economy: a cultural evolution in markets in which cooperation and sustainability become central drivers of economic performance.
To understand why such a shift may be necessary, it is useful to consider how paradigm shifts have transformed understanding in other domains.
When the Map No Longer Fits the Territory
History offers a useful analogy.
For centuries, many navigators believed the Earth was flat. Routes were planned and distances estimated on that assumption. Classical scholars had long suggested that the Earth was spherical (Aristotle had already argued in the fourth century BCE that the Earth is round), but it took centuries for this understanding to reshape how people actually navigated.
Once the more accurate model became widely accepted, navigation improved dramatically.
Thomas Kuhn later described such transformations as paradigm shifts, moments when the conceptual framework through which a field interprets reality changes fundamentally (Kuhn, 1962). In the natural sciences, such shifts primarily change understanding. In the social sciences, something more powerful occurs. Economic ideas do not merely analyse reality; they also shape how institutions are designed, how organizations are structured, and which behaviours are rewarded (Ferraro, Pfeffer & Sutton, 2005).
Economic paradigms, therefore, shape the environments in which people act. They also shape what counts as performance. A paradigm centred on individual competition defines performance in terms of individual output, ranking, and financial return. A paradigm centred on cooperation redefines performance to include the relational conditions, such as trust, coordination, and shared purpose, that enable groups to achieve collective outcomes. When the paradigm changes, so does the culture of competition and the meaning of economic performance itself.
For much of modern economics, the dominant paradigm has focused on individuals pursuing their own interests within systems of incentives and contracts (Friedman, 1962; Jensen & Meckling, 1976). Markets and organizations are therefore often understood primarily as mechanisms for coordinating self-interested actors.
The question today is whether the paradigm guiding modern economic organization still fits the world we now inhabit.
The Relational Nature of Collective Performance
Modern economic thinking largely analyses the world through the lens of individuals pursuing their own interests. Institutions, incentive systems, and performance metrics are therefore designed around the assumption that individuals compete and perform as separate actors. This logic often encourages standardized forms of performance and ranking systems that compare individuals against one another, while overlooking the diverse and complementary contributions through which groups actually create value.
Yet when we look closely at where real performance occurs, a different picture emerges. Scientific breakthroughs rarely result from isolated individuals but from communities of researchers working together. Effective organizations depend on coordinated teams rather than isolated performers. Complex societal challenges, from pandemics to climate change, require cooperation across institutions, sectors, and nations.
In practice, humans perform primarily in groups. Evolutionary research shows that our species evolved in cooperative groups and that groups capable of sustaining cooperation consistently outperform groups characterized by internal competition (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Wilson & Wilson, 2007).
From this perspective, performance does not arise from isolated individuals alone. It emerges from the quality of relationships that enable people to coordinate their actions within and between groups.
Many pressing challenges therefore arise from breakdowns in relationships between people. Environmental crises emerge when countries fail to cooperate over shared resources. Organizations struggle when collaboration between teams deteriorates. Political systems weaken when trust between citizens and institutions erodes.
These are relational problems. Yet the dominant economic paradigm offers limited tools for understanding or repairing them.
Modern economics studies cooperation in many forms, from game theory to institutional economics. However, studying cooperation is not the same as organizing an economic paradigm around it. In most models, cooperation appears as a phenomenon to be explained within a framework that still assumes self-interest as the primary organizing principle. The prosocial paradigm proposes a different starting point: cooperation itself becomes the central mechanism through which collective performance is understood.
In short, the conditions that enable cooperation are not incidental to performance; they are constitutive of it.
Prosociality, the human tendency to cooperate, help others, and coordinate toward shared goals, is already visible in many successful organizations and communities (Bowles & Gintis, 2011). The paradigm shift does not invent cooperation; it recognizes cooperation as a fundamental source of performance and begins to organize economic activity around it systematically.
Relational Diagnosis Through Adapted Core Design Principles
Understanding how cooperation emerges requires practical analytical tools. One influential framework comes from Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-recognized research on the governance of shared resources (Ostrom, 1990). Studying communities around the world, she identified recurring institutional features that enable groups to manage common resources successfully. She called them Core Design Principles (CDPs).
Subsequent work generalized these principles beyond commons governance to cooperative groups more broadly (Wilson, Ostrom & Cox, 2013), demonstrating their relevance for understanding the effectiveness of groups across diverse contexts.
Building on this generalization, the perspective developed here shifts the focus from groups as bounded entities to the relationships that connect actors within and across groups. In this perspective, the CDPs are adapted as tools for relational analysis. This means the CDPs apply to patterns of interaction at all levels, including between individuals, within teams, across organizations, and among larger systems such as governments or countries. They provide a way of assessing whether relational conditions enable cooperation to emerge and persist, or whether they undermine it. This also includes competitive contexts, where the CDPs shape the form that competition takes.
The adapted CDPs diagnose the relational conditions that support cooperation:
- Shared identity and purpose: People understand who they are in relation to one another and what they are working toward, including alignment with broader social and ecological systems, so that goals do not undermine the conditions on which collective performance depends.
- Fairness between contributions and benefits: Contributions are recognized and benefits are distributed in ways perceived as just.
- Participation in decisions affecting the collective process: Those affected by decisions have meaningful opportunities to influence them.
- Transparency of actions and outcomes: Relevant information about behaviour, decisions, and results is visible and accessible.
- Recognition of constructive behaviour and response to harmful behaviour: Cooperative behaviour is supported, and harmful behaviour is addressed in ways that enable learning and correction.
- Effective mechanisms for resolving conflicts: Disagreements are managed through fair and accessible processes that maintain relationships.
- The capacity to organize and govern collectively: Actors have the autonomy and capability to coordinate, adapt, and manage their interactions.
- Consistent application across relationships and levels: The CDPs must be aligned across interactions and levels of organization, including within groups, between groups, and across broader systems, so that cooperation in one context does not undermine cooperation in another.
Within the prosocial paradigm, this first CDP is extended by explicitly linking shared purpose to sustainability (Pfister et al., 2024). In this way, the adapted CDPs provide a basis for diagnosing not only whether cooperation is effective within a given context, but also whether it remains compatible with strong sustainability over time (Neumayer, 2003).
When the CDPs operate together, relational environments emerge in which opportunistic behaviour becomes difficult to sustain (Wilson et al., 2013). Contributions are visible, fairness is monitored, participation is expected, and harmful behaviour can be addressed. Under such conditions, actors cannot easily pursue narrow self-interest at the expense of others without this being recognized and corrected.
In this way, the CDPs provide a framework for relational analysis, allowing researchers and practitioners to examine cooperation across interactions between individuals, teams, organizations, markets, and relations between countries.
Where these conditions are present, cooperation tends to flourish. Where they are systematically undermined, as often happens in institutional arrangements built primarily around narrow self-interest, cooperation deteriorates and collective performance declines.
The Prosocial Market Economy
The prosocial paradigm also suggests a different understanding of how markets evolve.
Markets are often portrayed as arenas in which self-interested actors compete. Yet they are also cultural environments in which organizations observe, learn from, and adapt to one another.
Once organizations begin to recognize that performance emerges from the quality of cooperation they are able to cultivate, they increasingly design their structures, incentives, and management practices to strengthen these relational conditions.
Organizations that successfully do so often perform better, because trust reduces coordination costs, transparency improves decision-making, and shared purpose strengthens collective effort. As these advantages become visible, other organizations begin to adopt similar practices.
Over time, this process generates a cultural shift within markets. Organizations still compete, but they increasingly compete through their ability to build relationships that enable cooperation, that is, relationships characterized by trust, fairness, shared purpose, transparency, and participation.
Cultural evolution in markets does not automatically favour cooperative practices. Competitive pressures can also spread extractive or short-term strategies. The prosocial paradigm, therefore, highlights the importance of institutional and organizational conditions that allow cooperative approaches to outperform destructive ones over time.
In this way, the prosocial market economy emerges through cultural evolution within markets (Pfister et al., 2024). Gradually, this process reshapes market norms toward strong sustainability, aligning economic performance with the social and ecological conditions required for long-term human survival.
Competition remains a powerful force, but it becomes a competition for creating environments in which cooperation thrives. In this process, the very meaning of economic performance evolves. It is no longer defined solely by financial returns or efficiency gains but increasingly by the capacity of organizations to cultivate the cooperative relationships on which lasting value creation depends.
A Paradigm for an Interdependent World
Many leaders already recognize that trust, cooperation, and shared purpose matter. They see the difference between a team that works well and one that does not.
What changes under the prosocial paradigm is that these elements are no longer treated as peripheral cultural factors. They become central drivers of performance.
Organizations begin to ask different questions: not only what was achieved, but also which relational conditions made that achievement possible, and how those conditions can be strengthened.
As the criteria of performance change, so too do the qualities of leadership that are rewarded. Systems organized around individual competition tend to elevate leaders who excel at advancing narrow interests. Systems organized around cooperative performance favour leaders who strengthen relationships, integrate diverse contributions, and align the goals of their groups with the broader systems on which they depend.
In a deeply interconnected world, many of the challenges that matter most, including environmental, social, and geopolitical ones, cannot be solved by isolated actors optimizing for narrow self-interest. They require sustained cooperation across organizations, sectors, and borders.
Understanding how to cultivate and sustain that cooperation may therefore become one of the defining intellectual and practical challenges of our time.
Rethinking collective performance in this way does more than refine economic thinking. It opens the possibility of an economic paradigm capable of sustaining cooperation, sustainability, and human flourishing in an interdependent world.
References:
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton University Press.
Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. (2005). Economics language and assumptions: How theories can become self-fulfilling. Academy of Management Review, 30(1), 8–24.
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Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1976). Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4), 305–360.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Neumayer, E. (2003). Weak versus Strong Sustainability: Exploring the Limits of Two Opposing Paradigms. Edward Elgar.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
Pfister, J. A., Otley, D., Ahrens, T., Dambrin, C., Darwin, S., Granlund, M., Jack, S. L., Lassila, E. M., Millo, Y., Peda, P., Sherman, Z., & Wilson, D. S. (2024). Performance management in the prosocial market economy: A new paradigm for economic performance and sustainability. Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, 21(5), 397–443.
Wilson, D. S. (2026). On the Concept of Paradigms and a New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative Systems. ProSocial World.
Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E., & Cox, M. E. (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90(S1), S21–S32.
Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology. Quarterly Review of Biology, 82(4), 327–348.
