Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Society’s Coordination 27dination. Their incentive to bring a new term like “on line”into use is their own convenience, not a desire to take responsibilityfor language planning.Face-to-face or voice-to-voice interaction is not a requirementfor mutual adjustment, frequent though it is.Global ethical codes, for example, have emerged from tacitagreements among people, most of whom never see eachother. Coordination, say, of growth patterns of neighboringmunicipalities is often achieved by officials’ taking accountof one another’s moves rather than negotiating.All real-world coordinating systems are, of course, hybridsin which centrality and mutual adjustment depend oneach other, neither being wholly absent. Many of the extraordinarymutual adjustments of American politics were setin motion by the design of the U. S. Constitution, with aconstitutional convention playing a centralist role. Thatauto traffic moves on congested roadways is a joint accomplishmentof centrally designed rules and endless mutualadjustments among drivers.Reluctant RecognitionLike all forms of coordination, mutual adjustment naturallyis imperfect. Yet I think we have been misled by thenervous though greatly honored minds of Western politicalphilosophy to underestimate it. An overriding concern seemsto run through the history of thought: How can a societymaintain order? Obviously by controls that induce peopleto behave in orderly ways. The philosophers writing aboutorder lived in societies in which the controls believed necessaryfor order lay in the hands of elites who exercisedthem over their “inferiors.” Perhaps the philosophers couldnot imagine controls exercised in any patterns other than