Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

2Society’s CoordinationHaving presented the market system as a method of socialcoordination, I need now ask: What does social coordination(or organization) consist of? How is it accomplished?Coordination is a big concept. It will open the way to showthe broad effects of the market system on society ratherthan confine its effects to that segment of society called theeconomy.For the time being, let us rid ourselves of the idea of aneconomic system. Pretend that we have never heard of anysuch thing. Also drive out of our minds concepts usuallyused to explain the market system, like supply and demand,commodities, production and distribution. For a short time,forget them all. They would distract us from understandingthe key relation between market system and social coordinationor organization. Think society, not economy.Imagine 20 million families scattered over an uninhabitedterritory as large as France. At first they do not constitutea society but are no more than an unorganized aggregate.Each family retreats into isolation, and some wage waron others. How might they become a society? Throughpractices that coordinate them. These are practices that createinterchanges with each other for security and cooperationand, no less, for obtaining food and necessary objects,like tools.If you and I agree to lunch together, we have accomplisheda small coordination. A political party is a larger coordination,and 80 million people at peace with each other