Elinor Ostrom: uncommon

摘要

I first met Elinor Ostrom in the early 1970s. I was an assistant professor at Washington University, St. Louis, and she was a recently tenured associate professor at Indiana University who traveled to St. Louis from Bloomington on a regular basis to ride around dicey urban neighborhoods in police cruisers. Her research focused on metropolitan governance with special emphasis on the delivery of urban services of which police protection was a prime example. She was a member of the recently founded Public Choice Society (indeed, her spouse Vincent was a founding member) and was an adherent of the rational choice approach to social phenomena that later came to be identified under the banners of the Rochester School, the Virginia School, and the Bloomington School. But Elinor Ostrom was an uncommon scholar, and this shall be the theme of my brief contribution to this collection.