| Over the past decades there has been an increasing scholarly interest in corporate collective action because economic and social theories hypothesize that guilds and comparable corporate bodies such as commons and water boards play a fundamental role in economic, social and political development. Such institutions develop rules for economic transactions, form an important part of the framework for market exchange, enhance socio-political skills (they are typically governed by meetings, councils and other institutions through which the members exercise some form of democratic control) and build social capital (via networking). Moreover, the Low Countries seem to have been particularly active in the development of such bodies, which may help to explain the particular political ("the poldermodel") and economic paths this area has been following ever since. In order to study the origins and development of these corporate bodies, historians of guilds from the Netherlands and from abroad are in the process of compiling data sets containing their most important characteristics. The proposal aims to coordinate, harmonize and broaden this work on systematic data sets of guilds, in order to facilitate international comparative study of the rise and development of these corporate bodies in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Complemented with other data sets, the applicants aim at creating a data infrastructure that should shed a new light on the comparative study of pre-industrial ?corporate collective action?. The proposal consists of two parts. The first part is focused on merchant and craft guilds, and will bring together and expand the various data sets on the development of guilds, thus allowing spatial and temporal comparison of a number of key features of their development for several European countries and China. This data set will be complemented with a data set of independent variables for explaining the spatial and temporal variation of guilds. The second part of the project concentrates on the data collection, specifically for the Low Countries, for different but comparable types of corporate bodies set up by other social groups: commons (by farmers), waterboards (by land owners, mostly farmers, in low-lying areas), beguinages (by women), and journeymen?s boxes (knechtsbussen). The project is based on intensive cooperation between scholars working in different countries and with different fields of expertise. The latest forms of scholarly communication and research technology will be implemented to facilitate the exchange of high-quality (meta-)knowledge about the subject for the integration and comparison of the data sets. By setting up a so-called collaboratory, the participants will -within a secured web-environment- use and comment upon each other's data before the publication stage. Afterwards the data and accompanying metadata and (links to) publications will be concentrated in a data hub. By using a time-variant GIS (linked to a relational database management system), the researchers of the collaboratory will be able to perform diachronical and spatial analyses of the collected data. In the last stage of the project the portal site will be made freely accessible to a wider audience via a portal site where they will also have the possibility to submit their own theme-related data, thus ensuring that the data collection on corporate collection action is added to and updated. In cooperation with DANS the sustainable storage of the data and the accessibility of the portal site will be guaranteed. |
