by Alfie Kohn
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Product Description
No Contest stands as the definitive critique of competition. Contrary to accepted wisdom, competition is not basic to human nature; it poisons our relationships and holds us back from doing our best. In this new edition, Alfie Kohn argues that the race to win turns all of us into losers.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 No Contest review, 2008-03-24
Is the review for the book or Amazon as the procurer of the book? I received the book in a timely manner--blessedly quickly--I had lost my copy from the college bookstore; the good price was gratifying as I had already purchased a copy before. The book, No Contest, should be read by just about any literate American--I may disagree on a point or 2, but generally--99% of what he says is true (even if "inconveniently"--just like the other truths)--and someday he'll be saying "I told you so," because we probably won't listen--not enough of us soon enough anyway. So--there's a gloom and doom attitude for you. It created "cognizant dissonance," to put it in PC--pedagogically correct--terms, and I plan to try to manage any classroom that I may acquire, with the concepts he explained clearly in mind.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 misses the point, 2007-11-09
He is better in interviews than in print. It is more a compilation of others research he uses to back up his premise and as such becomes quite tedious as he gives too many examples to validate his relatively straight forward case.
I find little problem with the validity he demonstrates for his ideas, but was terribly dissapointed in his lack of ability to understand the true paradigm shift where people see their own possibilities dramatically expanded by others rather than limited by them, where the ultimate sadness of the destructive nature of competition is higlighted by the amazing things that can happen when people with different ideas get together. ( he mentions the notion that this can happen once as an afterthought in an sentence about cooperation ) The best he can do is champion cooperation, which is laudable, but simply doesn't have enough energy to it to generate much action for change.
Dana Johnson
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Hits the Mark, 2007-09-17
NO CONTEST confirms for me the idea that competition is rapidly becoming an obsolete thought form; or at the least is over sold. Although I came at it from the angle of potentially flawed neo-classical economic theory (i.e. its impossible to construct a Social Welfare function, a level playing field, or non-attenuated property rights which are pre-determinates of true competition or Pareto Optimality) where bounded rationality inhibits the effective functioning of markets (creating information asymmetry between consumers and producers) KOHN very eloquently sets about systematically destroying all the other justifications or merits of competition in other spheres of human relationship. That is, competition is not natural to our species, doesn't create the best skill set, does not solve scarcity of finite resources, and definitely is not "fun".
If competition were a natural and superior system of organising human relationship it would not require enforcement, indoctrination, or spurious rules of engagement. Much of which governments and companies employ through lobbying and grossly manipulative takeover behaviour (sometimes overtly) executed whenever they are in danger of losing control of resources. Simply changing the rules to move the playing field more in your favour is not the survival of the fittest, but the survival of the most corrupt.
Good on you Mr KOHN for sticking your neck out and done decades before the real damaging effects of climate change, global militarisation, and marginalisation of the majority of the world has come to light, and is now showing us how dinosaur some of our collective thinking in the competitive area really is.
However, as they say in aviation circles - "the flak is always thickest when you're right over the target". NO CONTEST definitely hits the mark - that alone is a useful indicator that this book is well worth the read, for open minds.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Did Adam Smith Get It Wrong?, 2007-02-23
Having just finished No Contest: The Case Against Competition, fully twenty years after its first publication, I feel like someone coming late to a party, only to find few have arrived before me in what I expected to be a crowded gathering. Scanning the divergent and often passionate Amazon reviews offered on this provocative, original, and gentle but thoroughly radical critique of our society, I felt compelled to add my voice and ask, simply, did Adam Smith get it wrong?
However you might answer that question, now or after reading No Contest, you will agree that the implications of your own answer are considerable, for you and, perhaps, for us all. Your ideas about competition are fundamental to the way you will live your life each day, to the type of world you will work to create, and to how you will feel about and treat those of us who are around you.
Across twenty-five reviews of No Contest spanning a decade, the book garners a solid four out of five stars, but there is a divergence in these reviews that is telling and important. Amidst mostly five-star ratings and words of praise and encouragement for what is an excellent work, consistently about twenty percent of reviewers rank this book very low and offer commentary that is quite dismissive. These latter reviews seem, in some cases, to lack poignancy and clear expression, an infraction Kohn cannot be accused of, and some are quite hostile.
I bring up this persistent disparity of reactions to No Contest because it underscores a central hypothesis of Kohn's work: that competition and the competitive structures around us alters us. Kohn's assembled research suggests that competition makes us reactive, aggressive, closed to new ideas and inimical to alternatives, bound to the rules of the games we are made to play.
Competition, Kohn argues, makes us less sensitive, less productive, less creative, and perhaps less intelligent. Competition narrows our focus and makes us less able to see our frames of reference for what they are - frames. Ones that are in truth malleable and expandable, and as such, ultimately indefensible. Life in competitive structures, life in a competitive mindset, may even make us less engaged in life itself, as it almost certainly makes us less engaged in others and their lives.
I read No Contest on the recommendation of a friend, after a brief but lasting conversation on the practical virtues of cooperation. As a friend, even if we have not met, I will recommend this book to you too. I make this recommendation with the certainty that No Contest will at least give you an interesting perspective on modern life, that it might provoke and irritate you, and that it may, as other reviewers have noted, cause you to wake up and live differently each day. I certainly feel this third way, and think the book is worth reading, simply given its potential to affect you in this way.
As a book that compiles a diverse body of research, No Contest is technically impressive, especially given its seemingly uncharted subject. Even after twenty years, and even as it is disagreeable to some, I found the book extremely well planned, elegantly written, carefully reasoned, and finely passionate. For some, No Contest will be worth having for the bibliography alone, which is extensive. In fact, its assembled evidence and the startling conclusions they lead to is part of the potentially mind-altering nature of the book. No Contest was not what I expected, and likely will not be what you expect now, with divergent views and passionate reviews apt to continue for some time to come.
A few reviewers have criticized No Contest for not offering enough practical guidance, but I am content to be left to think, and think practically, about its many ideas and conclusions, on my own and with others. We all live in a practical world and so do need work at what we value, but we also need to wonder a bit: if cooperation is superior to competition in category after category of human affairs, why is there simply not more of it around us? Some might argue that cooperation is in fact there, but masked by the heavy and obvious icons of competitiveness that frame modern materialist society.
As I am affected and willing to consider this and the many other important questions the book engenders, perhaps you will be too. Game theory and computer modeling of the last two decades, coming after this book was published, may offer insights into the conditions under which competitive and cooperative structures win out, but as yet not a clear and recognizable path to the states of sustaining cooperation posed as possible and desirable by Kohn. (I would welcome being googled and corrected on this last point.)
One last thought: beginning in the 1970s, the organizational psychologists Chris Argyris and Donald Schon wrote about empirically far more common "model I" group dynamics and, also empirically, far more effective "model II" behaviors. I always was comfortable with these neat non-labels, and thought I understood what they entailed, tacitly attributing the difference to levels of individual and group stress. After reading No Contest, though, I am now far more inclined to think these human patterns should rightly be renamed for what they really are: "competitive" and "cooperative" group dynamics. I'll leave you to consider this idea, important for people working with others and suggestive of what you will encounter with No Contest.
To end somewhat near where I began, let me finish by saying that No Contest is an awakening for many people and an irritant and even an outrage for a few, probably to all who are disciples of Adam Smith, or deacons in the world his ideas have wrought. No Contest stirred in me both a child and an old man, each wiser in the way children and elders can be wise - in their propensity for innocence and in their indifference to headstrong heads - and I hope No Contest will be this for you and more.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Important Issue , 2006-03-27
Kohn presents an excellent argument that needs to be heard. This is an important issue and his good work here truly presents a compelling case.
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