Co-option

This article is about a political term. For other uses, see Co-option (disambiguation).

Co-option, also known as co-optation and sometimes spelt cooption or cooptation, has two common meanings. It may refer to the process of adding members to an elite group at the discretion of members of the body, usually to manage opposition and so maintain the stability of the group. Outsiders are "co-opted" by being given a degree of power on the grounds of their elite status, specialist knowledge, or potential ability to threaten essential commitments or goals ("formal co-optation").[1] Co-optation may take place in many other contexts, such as a technique by a dictatorship to control opposition.[2]

Co-optation may refer to the process by which a group subsumes or acculturates a smaller or weaker group with related interests, or the process by which one group gains converts from another group by replicating some aspects of it without adopting the full program or ideal ("informal co-optation"). Co-optation is associated with the cultural tactic of recuperation, and is often understood to be synonymous with it.[3]

  1. ^ "Co-optation". Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University Press 1998.
  2. ^ Chu, Yun-han; Diamond, Larry; Nathan, Andrew J.; Shin, Doh Chull (1 September 2008). How East Asians View Democracy. Columbia University Press. p. 41. ISBN 9780231517836.
  3. ^ Kurczynski, Karen "Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn's Modifications'", in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics No. 53/54 (Spring–Autumn, 2008), pp. 295–96.

    the process by which those who control the spectacular culture, embodied most obviously in the mass media, co-opt all revolutionary ideas by publicizing a neutralized version of them, literally turning oppositional tactics into ideology. [] The SI [Situationist International] identified the threat of revolutionary tactics being absorbed and defused as reformist elements. [] The SI pinpointed the increasingly evident problem of capitalist institutions subverting the terms of oppositional movements for their own uses [] recuperation operated on all fronts: in advertising, in academics, in public political discourse, in the marginal discourses of leftist factions, and so on.