ABSTRACT
Commerce is the market economy, where firms compete in pursuit of profits, and all relationships between people in their roles as business owners, managers, employees, shareholders, consumers, inventors, traders, borrowers, and lenders are driven by commercial logic. Colin Danby rejects the idea of a dichotomy between commerce and community, arguing instead that people inhabit a single, mixed, underdetermined, and often confusing world in which people and institutions attempt to structure an uncertain future. In his view, it is necessary to resist the temptation to split the world into a business sector coldly focused on profits and a community sector that warmly revolves around caring and giving, as one finds both pro-sociality in the business sector and ruthless self-interested behaviors in the community. David Ellerman focuses on questions of commerce and community as they relate to the firm.
