Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Market-System Coordination 37forgotten is the espresso machine and the chains of cooperationthat constructed, delivered, and installed it. Howevergreat their distance from Milan, innumerable people playtheir roles in cooperation, and no less so than the surly orobliging waiter in the cafe. Remember the nursery rhyme,“This Is the House That Jack Built.” (But do not idealize theprocess; sometimes trucks are hijacked, enterprises embezzled,or the offers of would-be cooperators rejected.)Because we do not often pause to reflect on such chainsor webs of performance, we might miss the details of marketcooperation. Look inside a small segment of it. For thesmall performance of providing pencils to a pencil-chewingaccountant in the Milan importer’s office, a hundred peoplemay directly engage in their assembly, another hundred infabricating the erasers to be attached, a hundred in the constructionof the building in which they perform their pencil-makingtasks, a thousand easily in the generation anddelivery of electric power, another thousand as easily in thefabrication of the metal wires for power transmission, and,finally, several thousand in digging, refining, smelting, andtransporting the necessary ore. But there is no “finally.”Perhaps a pencil maker was one of those who asked for acup of coffee in the Milan cafe. Cooperation is not linear butmultilateral.None of the chains or webs connecting activities inColombia with those in Milan can we dismiss as random,accidental, or coincidental. The cooperation shows a highdegree of predictability. A coffee grower does not standhopefully at the edge of a rural road waiting, as though for avisit from a rich uncle, for possible buyers to come for thecoffee beans. Each grower depends on a buyer and is only infrequentlydisappointed.Consider, for another example, some of the many con-