Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

62 How It Worksand objects desired at the other end—from coffee grower tocafe. You and I wait passively at one end of a chain and areabsent from the thousands of interactions between enterprisesthat construct the chain that finally reaches us.Just as enterprises are the most frequent participants inthe market system, so also are they, except for some governments,the biggest. On one side of many a transactionstands an individual person; on the other side a corporatecollective. As a jurist put it, “elephants dancing among thechickens.” There is not even a rough similarity of influencebetween Nestlé or Unilever, on one hand, and one of theircustomers or employees on the other. General Motors,among the world’s largest corporations, has hundreds ofthousands of employees. The transactions that put the performancesof each employee at GM’s disposal in return for awage do not look at all like the transaction between a villageblacksmith and a hired helper. Indeed, these corporatecollectives are often the size of a nation rather than of a person.Each of the world’s largest corporations, if measured bysales, produces more than the gross national product ofmany a nation. Of the one hundred largest organized entitiesin the world, only a half are nations, the other half corporations.A single enterprise is often itself a collection of enterprisesreaching into many markets. Bertelsmann, anchoredin Germany, contains 375 companies in 30 countries, includingbook publishers, bookstores, radio and televisionstations, printing plants, makers of tapes and records, magazinepublishers (more than a hundred), and paper manufacturers.And there are networks of legally independent enterpriseslike the six keiretsu conspicuous in Japan, eachconglomerate built on overlapping stock ownership. In allmarket systems, looser combinations of enterprises rest on