Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Chosen Domain 103objects, although I have known husbands to tip their wivesfor a good dinner, very likely more demeaning than rewarding.Parents only peripherally pay children to do chores; insome societies they rent out their children. On the whole,children are coordinated by parental authority rather thanmarket system. Between spouses too, the allocation of responsibilitiesis decided less by a market transaction thanby various forms of inegalitarian mutual adjustment withina framework of moral rules.Not infrequently, observers of the market system minimizethe household as a social coordinator. True, the householdcannot achieve the nationwide or global coordinationthat the market achieves. Yet in many societies in whichwomen have chosen not to make their labor available to themarket or have not been permitted to do so, nonmarketfamily labor of women and children, together with the parttimework in the home of the male spouse, add up to morethan the total of labor coordinated through the market system.Even with two wage earners, contemporary familiesstill coordinate a great amount of family labor—the familyremains a prodigious social coordinator. Despite longvoicedspeculation on possible societies without families,and despite some exploratory moves in that direction, as inthe Israeli kibbutzim, the family’s role in social coordinationremains, for the time being, well established and a verygreat restriction on the scope of the market system.Indeed, the market system is better described as a coordinatorof collectivities called households than as a coordinatorof individuals. It is as an agent of such a collectivitythat a wage earner enters into the market to earn an incometo be distributed within the household. And it is as an agentof it that some members of the household purchase goodsand services to be distributed among its members.