The Uses of Diversity. David Ellerman
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Название: The Uses of Diversity
Автор: David Ellerman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Экономика
Серия: Polycentricity: Studies in Institutional Diversity and Voluntary Governance
isbn: 9781793623737
isbn:
18. Jacobs has noted the connection between top-down power and empire-building: “The biggest and most thoroughly centralized governments have always, finally, required the special environment of oppression to continue to maintain themselves. And some could never have attained their great size at all had they not grown in that environment” (Jacobs 1980, 77).
19. The virtues of small countries are more fully developed in the work of Leopold Kohr (1978).
20. In biological terms, the more that power is bottom-up in a firm, the more it is like an organism with reproductive cells under decentralized control throughout the organism rather than under central control in one specialized part.
21. For details, see the account by a preeminent American organizational theorist and his wife, Whyte and Whyte (1991).
22. In a democratic firm, where “corporate governance” is more than an oxymoronic phrase, the quality of the self-governance deteriorates as the firm gets larger so firms will tend to naturally subdivide anyway to keep the membership at workable levels. The upper limit might be between several hundred and a thousand members depending on the technologies involved.
23. See Ellerman (2003a) for more on this remarkable theory about migration. By this theory, just as a suburban bedroom community would not be considered “undeveloped” because the jobs were in a nearby city, so in today’s globalized world, a country that accepted the “international division of labor” as a supplier of transnational labor would not be “undeveloped”—it is only a “bedroom community” vis-à-vis the developed world.
24. “Possibly because so many ambitious and expensive attempts to force or coax economic expansion have failed during the second half of the twentieth century, it has finally become permissible to say that the emperor has no clothes—that economic theory can’t explain economic expansion” (Jacobs 2000, 158).
25. “A system—any system, economic or other—that at every point of time fully utilizes its possibilities to the best advantage may yet in the long run be inferior to a system that does so at no given point of time, because the latter’s failure to do so may be a condition for the level or speed of long-run performance” (Schumpeter 1962, 83).
26. See Lovejoy (1960, 293–94) on “diversity itself as the essence of excellence” (quoted in Jacobs 1980, 114) and Kanigel (1997) on the “One Best Way.”
Exit versus Voice and Commitment
Introduction: The Two Logics
There are two logics, dual to one another, that run throughout mathematics and the sciences as well as throughout questions of institutional design. The underlying duality is series-parallel duality that is best known from electrical circuit theory.1 The underlying model is the basic choice between multiple components connected in parallel or connected in series as in the two-terminal circuits in figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Parallel and Series Connections of Components.
In a tree search model, there is the branching of a stem into parallel boxes and there is the series connection of boxes to make a long branch. In searching over a tree, there are two logics. If the answer is not found in box A (see figure 2.2), does one backtrack and exit the A branch and try a parallel branch (B or C), or does one stay committed to the A branch and try further boxes along it (A1 or A2)? If one chooses A1 and it is unsatisfactory (“doesn’t have the answer”), then one has the choice to backtrack and exit the A1 branch and try A2 (or exit again to try B or C), or to stay committed to the A1 branch and try the further refinements A11 or A12.
Figure 2.2 Breadth-First Search versus Depth-First Search.
The choice is between the parallel-oriented breadth-first strategy and the series-oriented depth-first strategy. “The ideas of breadth and depth are in competition throughout the whole history of combinatorial optimization” (Strang 1986, 609).
The main work on this topic in human affairs is Albert Hirschman’s (1970) development of the contrast between the parallel-oriented logic of exit (exit the branch to try other branches) and the series-oriented logic of voice, loyalty, and commitment (stay loyal and committed to the given branch by searching further along it).2
As a variation on the tree model, we could think of options with characteristics. Suppose one has an option with unsatisfactory characteristics. Does one treat the characteristics as fixed and then seek improvement by exiting the option to find a better one? Or does one stick with the given option and try to change the characteristics for the better?3 Hirschman referred to the change-the-characteristics strategy as voice: “Voice is here defined as any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs” (Hirschman 1970, 30). These two logics of exit or voice (commitment) are quite common in human affairs. Does the “unhappy camper” fold his tent and look for a better campsite or does he work to make the given campsite better? Every potential migrant faces the question: Exit to find a better home or commit to making home better?
Managers constantly face similar decisions. When a team of workers is not performing satisfactorily, the manager has two choices. One choice is to take the capabilities of the team members as fixed so that people need to be shuffled in and out of the team until the right team characteristics are obtained. Or a manager might proceed with more commitment to the team members and then try to work with them to better develop their capabilities until the team performed satisfactorily.
The two logics are quite ubiquitous. I will call the parallel-oriented approach in an organizational or institutional context, the logic of exit. Decline and dissatisfaction leads to exit and replacement. I will call the series-oriented approach using voice in an institutional context, the logic of commitment.4 Decline and dissatisfaction leads to renewed commitment and the attempt to transform the characteristics (e.g., through the exercise of voice).
Five Points on the Two Logics
My first point is simply the ubiquity of the two logics—as I hope will become clear in the course of the argument. I will focus on cases where the two system logics are incompatible rather than cases where they need to be blended to find the best system.
The second point is that sometimes there seems to be an awareness of only one logic, for example the belief that improvement can only come through exit and replacement. For a trivial example, young people might think that the only response to a dull razor blade is to throw it away and replace it with a new sharp blade. But in “the old days” there were straight razors; when the blade got dull, one would sharpen it. This is an example of the two logics as the replace versus repair strategies: buy cheap replaceable items and replace as necessary or buy more expensive quality items and repair as necessary.
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