Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Personality and Culture 203ties. A big difference in structure of interchange should notbe missed. In recent and contemporary nonmarket societies,a relatively small elite or cadre of rulers and managerstreats the whole adult population as instruments for theachievement of elite ends. Market system or not, then, weare all instruments of others. But who the others are differsfrom system to system. Who plays the instruments? In marketsystems, almost everybody. In other systems, a very few.In market systems, however, one pervasive cold instrumentalismis prominent: sales promotion. It is matchedin communist societies by the instrumentalism of rulersintent on subduing a population by pageantry and propaganda.But sales promotion probably pushes cold instrumentalismfurther than it is carried by ruling officials indemocratic systems. For although democratic rulers devotemuch of their effort coldly and instrumentally to persuadingthe electorate to allow them to remain in office, they donot persist so relentlessly and with so great an avalanche ofpersuasive messages as does the sales-promotion industry.If communications from political elites try every week orday to manipulate me, communications from sellers tryseveral to many times each day.degradation of workWork in the market system is degraded, some critics hold,because its ennobling purposes are either lost or subordinatedto gaining income. More immediately, they are subordinatedto the purposes of the employer. If you are a wageearner you cannot indulge a passion for excellence except tothe extent that it serves an employer’s purpose. You cannottake satisfaction from having produced a product, becauseyour efforts are anonymously mixed with those of thousandsof others to produce, for example, a refrigerator that