How do we research this new economic paradigm?
Interdisciplinary research for a more cooperative, equitable and sustainable economy.
This section summarizes the scientific and conceptual elements underlying the paradigm and provides primary sources for deeper engagement.
Research continually reproduces a paradigm. It can repeat the prevailing one without examining it, or criticize it without offering a workable alternative. The prosocial market economy proposes a genuine alternative, one that meets both the logic of economic performance and the requirements of a sustainable future.
The foundations of the prosocial market economy
Performance management in the prosocial market economy: a new paradigm for economic performance and sustainability
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. and Wilson, D. S. (2024), Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 21 No. 5, pp. 397-443. Open access (CC BY 4.0).
Read the paper (open access)The contribution of this paper
Pfister et al. (2024) formulate and name the prosocial paradigm for accounting and management research, with performance management and management control systems as its focal field, and coin the concept of the prosocial market economy. Grounded in evolutionary science and cultural evolution, the paper brings this thinking into management and business organizations: it challenges the foundational assumption of economic man from neoclassical economic theory and redefines the primary purpose of performance management as cultivating prosocial behavior and building prosocial groups, in pursuit of economic performance and sustainability together. The proposition is offered as a starting point for accounting and management research at large, with multi-voiced reflections spanning financial markets, ESG, the public sector, digitalization, higher education and management scholarship.
The paradigm's premise, from evolutionary science: self-interested behavior can outperform prosocial behavior within a group, but prosocial groups outperform groups dominated by self-interest. On this basis, the paper defines prosocial behavior as the core activity of value creation in organizations.
The paper integrates Elinor Ostrom's core design principles, as generalized by Wilson, Ostrom and Cox (2013), into the theory and practice of performance management, and extends them in one decisive way: because the planet itself is a common-pool resource, the shared purpose and identity of a group must, by definition, be aligned with sustainability. A group whose purpose harms sustainability does not qualify as prosocial. This closes the loophole of highly cohesive groups with harmful missions.
From this, the paper derives and names the prosocial market economy: an aspired cultural evolution that works within market competition yet systematically strengthens prosociality as a cultural norm in organizations, markets and society, so that cooperation and sustainability become central drivers of economic performance.
Where the paradigm stands
Multilevel selection: within groups selfishness can beat altruism, between groups cooperative groups prevail. Wilson and Wilson (2007); extended by cultural evolution to organizations and markets.
The core design principles that let groups govern shared resources without exploiting them. Ostrom (1990); generalized to groups of any kind by Wilson, Ostrom and Cox (2013).
A shorter public companion piece: Pfister, J. A. (2026), "Rethinking Collective Performance: A New Economic Paradigm", ProSocial World, 19 March 2026, written for a broad audience.
The traditional and the prosocial paradigm compared
Table 2 of the paper compares the two paradigms across twelve dimensions. The rows below follow the paper, with wording lightly adapted.
| Dimension | The traditional paradigm | The prosocial paradigm |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Premise | Aligning self-interested behavior with organizational objectives creates competitive groups and performance. | Self-interested behavior can outperform prosocial behavior within a group, but prosocial groups outperform groups dominated by self-interest; they are more productive, creative, innovative and act more sustainably. |
| 2. Purpose of management control | Combine management control practices to align the behavior of self-interested individuals with organizational objectives. | Combine management control practices to cultivate prosocial behavior and build prosocial groups, aligned with the core design principles, in pursuit of organizational objectives. |
| 3. Role of self-interest | Mechanisms that exploit individual self-interest are crucial. | Establishing and maintaining prosociality is crucial; benefiting others serves self-interest in the long run, or does good without expecting anything in return. |
| 4. Opportunism | Normalized from an economic rationale: selfish and antisocial behaviors are tolerated to some extent and in some contexts. | Disqualified from an economic rationale: selfish and antisocial behaviors are managed and socially sanctioned. |
| 5. Competition and cooperation | As they serve self-interest, sometimes through selfish and antisocial behaviors. | Among groups in a graduated manner, based on the core design principles. |
| 6. Primary aspiration | Personal and organizational achievements. | Serving others. |
| 7. High performance | Being the best as an individual, team or organization, compared to the others. | Being the best self as an individual, team or organization, for the others. |
| 8. Primary reward beyond pay | Ego gratification. | The experience of making a positive difference in the lives of others through one's work. |
| 9. Multi-level view | Self-interested trade-offs among levels that harm the future of humanity and nature. | A multi-level approach that protects the future of humanity and nature. |
| 10. Humans and nature | Humans as separate entities, from one another and from nature. | Humans bear responsibility for one another and are an integrated part of nature. |
| 11. Values and social norms | Cultivates a narrative in which opportunistic behavior is normal, and in some contexts even expected and celebrated. | Systematically cultivates a narrative in which prosocial behavior is normal, expected, aspired to and celebrated. |
| 12. Governance | Falls into the tragedy of the commons: neither regulation nor privatization alone protects the common. | Ingrains self-governance and self-responsibility into performance cultures to protect the common. |
Source: Table 2 in Pfister et al. (2024), CC BY 4.0, wording lightly adapted.
How it differs from adjacent approaches
Several established frameworks address aspects of the problem the prosocial market economy engages with: stakeholder value, purpose-driven leadership, sustainability, systems thinking, humanistic management. The prosocial paradigm is distinct in what it explains and how. It provides the evolutionary and institutional grounding for why cooperation becomes a structural source of performance under interdependence; it offers a diagnostic (the core design principles, organized into four mechanisms) for assessing the relational quality of a system at every level; and it accounts for how these design choices translate, through cultural evolution, into shifts in market norms. The intent is not to replace these traditions but to clarify where the prosocial paradigm adds a distinctive explanatory and diagnostic contribution.
Relative to Wilson and colleagues, the prosocial paradigm goes further by treating the core design principles as a relational diagnostic embedded in performance management, the concrete machinery through which organizations steer behavior.
The extension introduced by Pfister et al. is that sustainability is built into the shared purpose by definition. A shared purpose and identity cannot, by definition, harm sustainability. This closes the loophole of highly cohesive groups with harmful missions.
| Approach | What it emphasizes | What the prosocial paradigm adds |
|---|---|---|
| Social Market Economy (Müller-Armack, 1946) | A market economy embedded in institutions that secure social welfare, combining economic freedom with social protection. | Locates the conditions for cooperation inside organizations and relationships, not only in state-level institutions. The state remains important as an enabler; the paradigm specifies the relational architecture that makes self-regulation within organizations viable. |
| Stakeholder Theory (Freeman, 1984) | Organizations should attend to the interests of all groups affected by their activities, not only shareholders. | Provides the explanatory logic, grounded in evolutionary science and Ostrom's core design principles, for why sustained cooperation across stakeholders becomes a structural source of performance, and specifies the design mechanisms that make this possible. |
| Conscious Capitalism (Mackey and Sisodia, 2013) | Business serves a higher purpose; leadership and culture are central to long-term value creation. | Shifts the locus of durability from leadership intent to system design. Purpose becomes resilient only when structurally embedded through self-regulation, self-governance and multi-level alignment. |
| Doughnut Economics (Raworth, 2017) | An economy operates within social foundations and ecological ceilings. | Provides the organizational and relational design logic through which these macro conditions translate into the architecture of value creation, capture and distribution inside firms and ecosystems. |
| Circular Economy (Pearce and Turner, 1990) | Material flows and resource efficiency are restructured to reduce waste and close loops. | Addresses the relational and behavioral conditions, cooperation across actors in a supply or value system, without which material circularity is difficult to sustain. |
| New Public Governance (Osborne, 2010) | Public services are delivered through networks that require collaboration across sectors. | Applies the same relational design logic across public and private sectors, providing a shared diagnostic for cooperation regardless of institutional boundaries. |
| B Corp Movement (Gilbert et al., 2006) | Businesses certify their commitment to social and environmental performance. | Explains why structurally cooperative designs succeed under pressure, and offers a diagnostic that goes beyond certification to assess the coherence of the underlying design. |
| ESG Frameworks | External reporting and risk management on environmental, social and governance dimensions. | Shifts emphasis from external disclosure to the internal architecture that produces durable ESG performance: self-regulation, self-governance and aligned purpose across levels. |
| Regenerative Economy (Mang and Haggard; Raworth et al.) | Economic activity is reoriented toward restoring ecosystems and social wellbeing. | Specifies the team- and organization-level design mechanisms through which regenerative intent becomes operationally embedded rather than aspirational. |
| Systems Thinking (Senge; Meadows) | Problems are interconnected and must be analyzed as systems. | Adds a specific diagnostic, the core design principles organized into four mechanisms, that can be applied to assess and improve the cooperative architecture of any given system. |
| Humanistic Management (Pirson et al.) | Human dignity, ethics and wellbeing are central to management practice. | Links these normative commitments to performance through an evolutionary and institutional logic, and provides the design vocabulary to act on them. |
Foundation in evolutionary science
The paradigm's first foundation is multilevel selection theory. Within groups, selfish individuals can outcompete altruists; between groups, groups of cooperators outperform groups dominated by self-interest (Wilson and Wilson, 2007). Maximizing relative advantage within a group seldom maximizes the performance of the group.
Major evolutionary transitions occur when selection between groups becomes sufficiently dominant over selection within them: groups become so cooperative that they function as units in their own right. Self-interest is not eliminated in these cases; it is kept under control by a set of mechanisms. Humans are a product of such a transition. Throughout our history as a species, people never lived alone; they survived in highly cooperative groups. Acquiring a group identity and aligning personal interests with the group is therefore natural rather than naive, and cooperative groups remain vulnerable to exactly two failures: loss of coordination, and disruptive self-serving behavior from within.
This logic is not limited to biology. Cultural evolutionary theory applies it to how cultures, organizations and markets develop: practices vary, are selected and are retained, and prosocial cultures can be deliberately cultivated. Evolutionary research shows that prosocial collectives are more productive, creative and innovative than groups dominated by self-interest (Atkins, Wilson and Hayes, 2019). This is the competitive logic on which the prosocial paradigm builds: cooperation is not an ethical ideal but a structural source of performance, and the conditions for it can be designed.
Foundation in institutional governance
The second foundation answers the question of how cooperative groups hold together in practice. The famous "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin, 1968) predicted that shared resources are doomed unless they are either regulated from above or privatized. Elinor Ostrom demonstrated a third way. Studying communities that manage forests, fisheries and pastures around the world, she showed that groups can self-govern shared resources without exploiting them, and she identified the core design principles that make such cooperation work (Ostrom, 1990). This work was recognized with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Wilson, Ostrom and Cox (2013) generalized these principles beyond common-pool resources to groups of any kind: teams, organizations, associations, even countries. When a group has the principles in place, exploiting it from within becomes nearly impossible, and succeeding together becomes the only viable path. Pfister et al. (2024) integrate these principles into performance management and extend them in one decisive way: because the planet itself is a common-pool resource, the shared purpose and identity of a group must, by definition, be aligned with sustainability. On this foundation, the four design mechanisms condense the principles into a relational diagnostic for organizations.
Key references
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. and 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. and Wilson, E. O. (2007), "Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology", Quarterly Review of Biology, 82(4), 327-348.
Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E. and Cox, M. E. (2013), "Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups", Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, S21-S32.
Atkins, P. W. B., Wilson, D. S. and Hayes, S. C. (2019), Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups, Context Press.
Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (2011), A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, Princeton University Press.
Wilson, D. S. and Gowdy, J. M. (2013), "Evolution as a general theoretical framework for economics and public policy", Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90(S), 3-10.
Wilson, D. S., Madhavan, G., Gelfand, M. J., Hayes, S. C., Atkins, P. W. B. and Colwell, R. R. (2023), "Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications", PNAS, 120.
Wilson, D. S. and Snower, D. J. (2024), "Rethinking the theoretical foundation of economics I: the multilevel paradigm", Economics, 18(1).
Pfister, J. A. (2026), "Rethinking Collective Performance: A New Economic Paradigm", ProSocial World, 19 March 2026.
Questions, or working in this area?
If your research touches the prosocial paradigm, or you would like to discuss it, get in touch.
Jan Pfister, Principal Investigator
Turku School of Economics, University of Turku
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