Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

104 How It WorksThe collective enterprise, especially the big corporation,is the third alternative to the market system. While enterprisesextend the market system’s domain in several dimensions,they restrict it in others. For enterprises constitute,as we have said, islands of nonmarket or managerialcoordination in a market milieu. Where once a dozensmaller enterprises may have constituted, through theirmarket interchanges with suppliers and customers, an importantpart of the steel industry, many of their market activitiesmay have been brought under the authoritative directionof the single corporation that displaced thosemarket interchanges.Although the state is the principal instrument of systematiccompulsion required to achieve social coordination,both enterprise and family are also instruments ofcompulsion. Enterprises are, among other things, systemsfor inducing people, in return for wages, to accept thecompulsions of their employers. Enterprise compulsionsare limited; obviously an employee can leave an enterprisemore easily than a citizen or taxpayer can emigrate. Familycompulsions are notorious.A substantial and perhaps increasing share of the task ofsocial coordination is borne by the fourth alternative: civilsociety. For some people who use the term, it denotes coordinatingcollectivities other than enterprises and governmentalorganizations. These collectivities, remarkably diversein structure and objective, seem to resist efforts to becategorized as nonprofits. Among them are political parties,lobbying organizations, charities, clubs, research laboratories,and museums.These entities may operate largely outside the marketsystem—for example, a reading club whose members meetmonthly for discussion. On the other hand, they, especially