Competition is the act of two or more people or Companies trying to achieve more than each other. This competitiveness is highly supported within the [Information Society]. This is the opposite of co-operation in which two or more people work together to achieve a greater outcome. Competitiveness is a keystone of capitalism and the Information Society, as people are constantly encouraged to dislike and work against each other in the belief that it will push their standards to a higher level than co-operation would (Kohn, 1992).
The primary objective of competition is within a commercial environment. The public is lead to believe that by maintaining a healthy amount of competition between producers of similar products, there will be a guarantee of quality and variety at a reasonable price. It will also ensure that no one company shall dominate any particular market.
The desire to compete is respected with in the individual. People are encouraged to have a favourite colour, team, country, brand, television program, and the list goes on. They are encouraged to try to be better than everyone else but not say it directly (Kohn, 1992). This essentially means that people are encouraged to hide their true motives so as to get ahead in the world and ‘protect’ themselves from the ‘threat’ of other people who may harm them, either physically, mentally of financially. More often than not people are lead to believe that others will harm us and not help us, so they will compete with each other with the goal of ‘being the best’.
Competition in the E-Commerce - Amazon - Corporate Culture world forces companies to change in order to survive, often leading to loss of jobs. Unionised employees negotiate for better compensation, but the prospects for job [Privacy - Personal Data Security]] are increasingly jeopardized by demands for greater benefits (Banks & Stephens, 1997). Consumers’ benefit from competitive pricing, but sometimes at the expense of small businesses, which are unable to offer the same number of discounted products as promised by larger corporations.
E. O. Wilson (2000) distinguishes two modes of competition, scramble and contest. Scramble is exploitative, without universal rules of conduct governing the scramble for limited resources. For example a group of excited shopped rushing to buy discounted items. Contest involves a conscious struggle for appropriating specific resources and thus permitting a winner in a contest competition. This ensures certain rules of behaviour and predicts certain agreed-upon outcomes, such as winner-take-all
Daniel Cotter 15:49, 16 Oct 2005 (EST)
