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:
A simple cooperative action game (of the prisoner’s dilemma variety) can be used to illustrate the difference between a company based on low trust with individual optimization and a company based on high trust, identification with the firm, and a cooperative corporate culture (see Leibenstein 1984 for the best treatment of this approach to the Japanese firm). The players A and B could be thought of as managers and workers (or as any two groups in the firm) who need to cooperate together to increase the X-efficiency of the firm (table 2.1).
Table 2.1 Typical Cooperative Action Game
If each player chooses the individualistic not-cooperate action, then they receive the noncooperative payoff of $A and $B. If they cooperate, then the total result increases by (say) 2 which we assume is evenly split to arrive at the cooperative payoffs of $A+1 and $B+1. But if one party opportunistically chooses the individualistic noncooperative option when the other party acts cooperatively, then the total result remains the same (no increase without cooperation of parties) and two units are shifted to the opportunistic party. The strategy pair (Not Cooperate, Not Cooperate) is the dominant equilibrium solution. No matter which strategy one player chooses, it will always pay the other player to take the noncooperative action. But that noncooperative outcome ($A, $B) is dominated by the cooperative outcome ($A+1, $B+1) which is better for both parties.
This prisoner’s dilemma-type game is a generic representation of the countless cooperative action situations that occur continuously and at every level in the complex multiperson productive operation of a firm. In each given situation, effective monitoring and enforcement might be applied at a certain cost to change the payoffs and thus assure the cooperative outcome. But this “external” neoclassical solution is hardly feasible over the countless cooperative action situations that occur in a complex team operation.
The question is not whether free riders exist—much less employees who exert something less than their maximum—but why there is anything besides free-riding. Why do many workers, perhaps most, exert more than minimally enforceable effort? Why do employees identity with organizational goals at all? (Simon 1991, 34)
That question is left unanswered in the exit-based American-style model. The Japanese-style company uses the alternative “internal” solution of developing a corporate culture of mutual commitment and cooperation that leads to a virtuous circle or high-level self-reinforcing equilibrium. This cooperative culture is feasible because the managers and workers see themselves as the members of a commitment-based community and will reap the joint fruits of their cooperative efforts.
One logic or the other ramifies through all the aspects and structures of a firm. Sometimes a firm organized on the logic of exit is stereotyped as the “American firm” and a firm organized on the logic of commitment is the “Japanese firm” or “J-firm” (Aoki 1988). But without promoting stereotypes, we can still summarize and compare in table 2.2 some of the ways that the two logics affect firm structure.15
Table 2.2 Two Firms
Ownership for Liquidity or for Enterprise?
Perhaps the last line of table 2.2 requires some explanation. We can distill this wisdom from the academic scribblings of the defunct economist, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was much concerned with the adverse effects of the stock exchange on real investment and enterprise. Investment in productive enterprise is largely irrevocable, and the management of enterprise requires a long-term commitment and the application of “intelligence to defeat the forces of time and ignorance of the future” (Keynes 1936, 157).16 In short, it is based on the logic of loyalty and commitment. But when investment is securitized as a marketable asset on the stock exchange, then it “is as though a farmer, having tapped his barometer after breakfast, could decide to remove his capital from the farming business between 10 and 11 in the morning and reconsider whether he should return to it later in the week” (Keynes 1936, 151). The stock exchange panders to the “fetish of liquidity” and thus continually undermines the bonds of long-term commitment that are so important to problem-solving and productive enterprise. Keynes, of course, wrote this long before today’s problems with stock options and short-termism. Today’s practice of the captain’s exit facilitated by a golden parachute is the opposite of the practice of the captain going down with the ship.
In addition to this continual erosive effect, the stock exchange also absorbs otherwise productive capital in the function of speculation—which Keynes defined as “the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market” (Ibid., 158). Keynes saw no problem when speculation was but a bubble on the stream of enterprise, but it was quite another matter “when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done” (Ibid. 159). This is even more true when the casino is global rather than national.
Today, Keynes’s “stock exchange” must be updated to the global market for bonds, stocks, and currencies. The dangers to investment in enterprise that Keynes highlighted during his day are even greater in our own. Yet Keynes recognized that there is no simple answer in making investment illiquid as “this might seriously impede new investment.” Few will enter if the door locks behind them. “This is the dilemma” (Ibid. 160). But since investors on today’s public capital markets are not enterprisers, the solution lies in the direction of converting equity shares into variable income debt-like instruments that are still liquid.
Markets and Organizations: Not Only Markets
Consider the application of the logic of exit versus the logic of commitment in an organization. The exit logic looks at an individual as a market participant—even inside an organization. The individual’s actions within the organization are evaluated according to how the actions affect the person’s market opportunities, for example in acquiring more marketable skills, increasing bargaining power, and the like.
In contrast, the logic of commitment looks at the individual as a member of an organization so that a different set of factors come into play such as trust, voice, firm-specific skills, cooperation, voice, and identification with the organization. It is this whole logic of commitment and the conception of an organization other than just a nexus of market contracts that is missing in the vision of conventional neoclassical economics. Thus, all the investment climate reasoning concerned with building productive organizations tends to be ignored unless it can be reduced back to market behavior.
Herbert Simon’s Vision of the Organizational Economy
One person who spanned the disciplines of economics and organizational theory and who spent a lifetime investigating both markets and organizations was economics Nobel-laureate Herbert Simon. Economists tend to have a cognitive map of the world (like Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover) where markets dominate the landscape except for small market failures (small “lumps in a pail of buttermilk”) known as “organizations” off in the distance. Having studied both organizations and markets throughout his career, Simon found that the reality in the advanced economies was almost the opposite. Instead of thick markets connecting small organizational dots, Simon saw a world of organizations СКАЧАТЬ