Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

40 How It Worksinstead produce performances. And when market activitydoes result in objects, it is human performance that accomplishesthat result.The term marketplace is, incidentally, almost always amisnomer. The market system is not a place but a web, nota location but a set of coordinated performances. Some interactionsconnected with each other in a market systemoccur in definite locations—a farmers’ market or a stockexchange—that can be called marketplaces. But many marketsare placeless, their interacting participants widely separated.They are better represented by telephone connectionsor Internet communications than by any place.Although the market system organizes cooperation, Iwould not call that its purpose. The market system does notexist “for” cooperation, or for any of the other purposes oftenattributed to it. It is not “for” satisfaction of want or forcapital accumulation or for elite exploitation of the masses,three diverse purposes often assigned to it. People, not socialprocesses, pursue purposes, as do some animals and organizations.But market systems do not, though of courseparticipants in them do. It is a mindless and purposelessmarket system that accomplishes the great tasks of socialcooperation. And, again, it organizes cooperation that servesall kinds of individual purposes; it is not limited to facilitatinga category of purposes called economic.The proposition that the market system arranges socialcooperation goes down hard with people who have longidentified the market with competition, even with dog-eatdogferocity. True, market systems embrace many arenas ofcompetition. But every participant in the market systemlinks cooperatively with millions of others while competingwith relatively few. In the coffee example, shippers are