Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

202 What To Make of Ittaker, one is tempted to generalize that market relations arenot only instrumental but predatory. Often they are. Butthe market relations between one dairy farmer and anotherand their relations with the cheese producer to whom theysell their milk are of a different kind. The relations are distant,so distant that the farmer may not see himself as havingany relation at all to other farmers. He may not knowthem or have reason to think about them. He does not seethem as instruments, nor can he exploit them. And, thenagain, some market relations are very warm. Friendshipssometimes grow out of repeated interactions. Shopperssometimes count among the pleasures of shopping theirconversational interchanges, enjoyed for their own sake,with sellers. In the variety of interrelations it offers, themarket system is a good deal more complex than the nowweary elephant to whom the three blind men seem destinedforever to be attentive.If, however, many market relations are distant and impersonal,then at least those relations are not warm, asmany nonmarket relations of sociability and friendship are.And Internet shopping may further lower the temperature.But again, these cool or cold interchanges leave room forwarm nonmarket relationships that flourish, as survey researchtells us, in market societies. And again, not all nonmarketinteractions are warm: compare a sales brochurewith a summons from a draft board.Given urbanization and industrialization, are interactionswarmer in nonmarket societies than in market societies?Were they warmer in the Soviet Union and communistChina than in Western Europe market societies? Notlikely: witness the legendary indifference or rudeness of retailclerks and waiters in the USSR or the cold maneuveringof Soviet consumers to get their hands on scarce commodi-