Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

196 What To Make of Itcoincided, although usually after a time lag, with the rise ofpolitical democracy. If it is agreed that these movementsfed on each other, just how does one sort out cause and effect?Clearly industrialization, urbanization, technologicalinnovation, and bureaucratic organizations took off on atrack largely independent of the market system in the SovietUnion. Hence the market system cannot be credited ordebited. That begins to undermine confidence in any hypothesisthat ties contemporary aspects of personality andculture to a source in the market system. We are left notwith a connection but with a headache.Thus, if many people come to spend their workdays undera supervising authority rather than under the control ofcommunity and custom, perhaps one has to attribute thatspecific change not to the rise of the market system but tothe rise of large commercial and industrial organizations.Nonmarket systems organize big enterprises no less thanmarket systems do. The bureaucratization of production isworldwide, in communist as well as in market systems.The boss is not an animal peculiar to the market system.One can even question the three-hundred-year transformationas it is described. In the transformation from aworld of community toward a world of purposive organizations,the market system is usually seen as belonging to thelater world but not the earlier. Something is wrong. Marketrelations take the form of multilateral, widely diffused interchangesamong most adults. They are not at all limitedto the relations, heavily unilateral, among participants in aformal organization. They are not, to be sure, quite the relationsthat characterize tradition-bound communities. Likethem, however, they take the form of webs of multilateralcontrol tying people together in innumerable connections.The contrast between the two forms of society—com-