Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

Ethics’ Political Imperative: Moving Toward Better Institutions 49
one-and-a-half-million employees dowhat they do every day, but also because
hundreds of millions of people shop on Amazon recurrently, because suppliers
sell Amazon the goods it resells, because more than amillion vendors use Amazon
as asales platform (“the Marketplace”), because people buy and sell Amazon
stock, because government regulators let Amazon do what it does, and so
on. That is to say that many millions of people carry Amazon.All of them together
make Amazon what it is. Ditto for the independent bookstore.
Institutions do not exist in neatly separable units but in more or less dense
interrelationships with each other. Amazon, for example, can rely on ahuge
number ofskills and habits that its employees and customers have acquired
elsewhere. It can rely on institutionalized forms of communication, transportation,
and storage; on governance, law, and law enforcement; on standardized
measures of time, weight, volume, money, and electronic payment systems, as
well as on ethics of work, keeping promises, etc., none of which it has created.
Since Amazon can work only by enrolling these institutions to make itself work,
and since these institutions are shared with others, it is suitable to designate
them as infrastructural institutions. Of course, Amazon itself has increasingly
become an infrastructural institution for the data warehousing, selling, and
sourcing efforts of ahuge range of other institutions. All institutions rely on
such infrastructural environments, and they are often infrastructures for each
other.
Preciselybecause institutions exist in the enchainment of actions that could
be altered in manner, force, direction, timing, and so on, they are in principle
malleable. Actions can cease to take place altogether, which is to say that institutions
can also disappear. IfAmazon workers stayed away for good, if customers
opted to boycott it, Amazon would cease to exist. Forming, maintaining, and
changing institutions intentionally is what politics is all about. At the heart of
politics, then, lies the inducement of particular actors, the carriers of an institution,
to engage inparticular actions in response to other actions. This can be
hard and frustrating work because many people need to be enrolled and properly
coordinated toachieve desirable effects. The potential for slippage in the
translation from political intention to actual institutionalization is considerable.
The means of politics range from joint deliberation to generate amutually
supported transformational goal, to persuasion and incentivization, and to various
forms of coercion. The more complex the institutions marked for change
are, the more urgent it is to form meta-institutions by charging designated personnel
to manage their formation, maintenance, or change. Institution and metainstitution
together form an organization. 8 Amazon has aprofessional manage-
8
Understanding the political importance of organization was pioneered by Robert Michels.
See his Soziologie des Parteiwesens: Eine Untersuchung über die oligarchischen Tendenzen
des Gruppenlebens [1911] (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1989).