COPYRIGHT Frank Cass & Company Ltd. (UK) 1994

INTRODUCTION

Jean-Philippe Platteau's two-part study 'Behind the Market Stage Where Real Societies Exist' (this issue and Vol.30, No.3, April 1994) is a substantial contribution to development studies. I have great respect for the work of analysis and synthesis that he has undertaken. I agree with him that (a) markets are not 'external' to society, and can only function in the context of appropriate social arrangements; and (b) the 'transferability' or 'extension' of market relationships into new arenas is an issue of great practical and intellectual importance. I also find that the basic conceptual framework he has employed provides a useful way of beginning to analyse the issues, although I suggest below that it is not fully clear and is incomplete. My substantive disagreement with Platteau concerns his scepticism about the scope for (rapid) extensions of market relations in developing countries. I am optimistic that the social relations that underlie effective markets (in 'advanced' societies) may be created more rapidly than he implies, and created through the market process itself -- through the social ties and trust built up through the experience of market transactions -- rather than through the more pervasive changes in social norms on which Platteau focuses. I am more optimistic than Platteau about the scope for the market to create and sustain its own social order because I have a different understanding of the characteristic social content of market relations. In sum, I argue that he underestimates the importance of both inter-business markets and institutional (rather than personal) reputation mechanisms. In reality, there is insufficient evidence to justify either of our positions. Debating the issue may help expose the extent of our ignorance, and point to some ways in which this may be remedied.

THE PROBLEM

Market exchanges give rise to ample opportunities for fraud and theft -- behaviour which the New Institutional Economists often label 'opportunism'. If people were regularly to behave in an opportunist fashion, market exchange would become risky, rare, and confined largely to carefully structured face-to-face transactions in which exchanges of money for goods or services would be made simultaneously, and with close scrutiny of the quality of the goods and services provided and of security arrangements. In such circumstances, exchange would remain primitive, and market society as we know it would not exist. It is widely agreed that, even in societies where the rule of law is respected, law plays only a limited role in regulating commercial transactions. Many transactions are so complex that the law cannot possibly cover all contingent circumstances. The cost of recourse to law may be too high in relation to the potential benefit. And the reliable independent evidence needed to win a legal case is frequently unavailable for private commercial transactions. What then makes people aware that they are incompletely protected by law willing to dispense with detailed personal policing of every transaction, and put great trust in exchanges involving large apparent risks, including exchanges carried out at long-distance, through intermediaries, and without surety or detailed inspection of the quality of goods or services purchased? There is a wide consensus that the answer lies somewhere in the sphere of social relations, and that the problem may be viewed as one of the generation of trust. This is the issue which Platteau addresses.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Platteau discusses the potential role of four different mechanisms in generating market order (the alphabetical arrangement and labels are mine):

(A) Generalised morality (B) External sanctioning institutions (C) Decentralised mechanisms (D) Coordinated public and private order institutions

(A) Generalised morality. This is the notion that people (mainly) desist from opportunism because they are influenced by social norms of honesty and fair dealing. Platteau's central argument is that generalised morality plays a major role in the creation of market order -- a more important role than some other theories and conceptual frameworks might indicate. He subscribes to the view that, historically, market systems have developed best where 'underlying' social norms have been most supportive.

(B) External sanctioning institutions. This refers essentially to the law. For the reasons given above, Platteau and I share in the widespread consensus that law can play only a limited role in the creation of market order.

(C) Decentralised mechanisms. These Platteau explains clearly in his section I. The simplest such mechanisms are bilateral: two businesswomen may desist from cheating one another because, once discovered, cheating would put an end to their business relationship, and thus involve loss for both in the long term. Multilateral networks are, however, more powerful, both positively and negatively. Suppose, for example, that A . . . Z form an interacting business-cum-social network. If A is believed to have cheated B, and B is held to be trustworthy, A may be the loser in the long term because C, D, E . . . Z will then limit or terminate their business relationship with A. Conversely, the knowledge that C is part of the same network as myself will encourage me to do business with him. Other network members may furnish reliable information about his character, his business, and how much credit, for example, I can profitably extend to him. Because of the possibility of using the network as a sanctioning mechanism should he cheat or default, I can trust him beyond random others. The defining characteristic of these 'decentralised mechanisms' is that they are purely decentralised. There is no external coordination; each participant makes autonomous decisions.

(D) Coordinated public and private order institutions. The conceptual distinction between this category and category (C) lies in the word 'coordinated'. It is a distinction that Platteau regards as very important: he labels mechanisms (D) -- and (B) -- as 'institutions', but explicitly denies this title to category (C) mechanisms. It is in fact in relation to his definition of category (D), and the way in which he distinguishes it from category (C), that I begin to have substantial doubts about Platteau's conceptual framework. There are three distinct but related points.

The first is that Platteau does not specify very clearly the range of institutions covered under category (D). The discussion in his article (section I) mainly relates to particular examples from medieval Europe and modern Belgium rather than to concepts. The existence of some kind of coordination is the only general conceptual point.

The second point is that the difference between mechanisms in this category and those that fall into category (C) may often be very small in practice. In section 1.4, using the work of |Greif, 1992^, Platteau discusses one such example at length. In medieval Europe, private Law Merchants, chosen by merchants themselves, helped to ensure fair dealing simply by diffusing information about cheats. The enforcement mechanisms remained entirely decentralised: cheats were sanctioned by other merchants limiting their dealings with them. The 'coordinated' element in the total mechanism -- in this case the Law Merchants -- could have been important to the overall functioning of the system, or, equally, could have been peripheral, with decentralised social relations doing most of the work. In either case, the system is categorised by Platteau under (D), and distinguished clearly from type (C) mechanisms. This is not wrong. However, I suggest that it is unhelpful to employ a categorical distinction which |a^ cuts right across the class of personal reputation mechanisms which perform so much of the work of creating and maintaining market order; and will result in very similar institutions being classified differently, or the same institution moving backwards and forwards across this conceptual frontier as a small amount of 'coordination' is introduced or withdrawn. This set of personal reputation mechanisms is embedded both in organisations that formally appear 'economic' but are also to a large degree 'social' (for example, Chinese Chambers of Commerce throughout Southeast Asia) and in organisations that we tend to classify as 'social' (dining clubs, religious communities, 'batchmates' of people who attended the same higher education institution together, caste groups, golf clubs, kinship networks, loosely knit networks of acquaintances and so on), but also serve to reinforce business reputation mechanisms by providing channels for the flow of information.

My third and most important point about Platteau's categories is that, by concentrating on this minor distinction between decentralised and coordinated personal reputation mechanisms, Platteau has missed entirely a whole category of reputation mechanisms that can play a major role in sustaining market order in 'advanced societies' -- institutional reputation mechanisms. This point is pursued below.(1)

THE DISAGREEMENT

Platteau states in his summary that the 'embeddedness thesis' (which may also be labelled the 'limited trust' approach -- see note 1) 'cannot fully elucidate the question as to how the problem of trust is solved in market societies'. That in itself is not a very strong claim. In fact, he is taking a rather firmer stance: that 'generalised morality' mechanisms are important, especially in 'advanced' societies. It is this somewhat stronger position that I question.

Platteau's case for the important role of 'generalised morality' mechanisms for well-functioning markets in 'advanced' societies in large part proceeds through a method of 'residuals': an argument that the other mechanisms listed above cannot do the job adequately. More precisely, the key to his position lies in three propositions: (a) that 'long run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors' (his Summary) make a substantial contribution to tackling the problem of market order in 'traditional agrarian' societies; (b) that they are far less effective in 'advanced societies', because they cannot cope adequately with the demands of an extensive division of labour, mobility, long-distance transactions and so on; and (c) that, assuming that other mechanisms do not compensate, it is 'generalised morality' that has to fill the gap.

I suggest that Platteau's analysis of the social content of markets may be wrong on two grounds:

(1) Following a long intellectual tradition, he implicitly exaggerates the economic significance of consumer markets and underestimates the role of inter-business markets. Impersonal or anonymous markets comprise series of unrepeated spot transactions which bring buyer and seller together only briefly, and physically perhaps not at all, with no continuing relationship. We seem to find these conditions in the exchanges with which we are familiar: buying vegetables, shirts, train tickets and newspapers. We tend to identify such transactions, which appear to provide the conditions under which opportunism might flourish, as characteristic and definitive of the social content of the market. But, leaving aside both labour and land markets, which are special in different ways, there are a whole series of other markets, which are collectively much more important than consumer markets, in which repeated transactions and long term relations are more common, and in which the trust problem is solved on a 'limited' basis -- through the linkages and the reputations built up from repeated transactions within 'networks' which serve as conduits for information. These are essentially (a) markets for production inputs, especially credit, capital, raw materials and processed inputs; and (b) wholesale markets in the distribution sector. The same businesspeople transact with one another regularly, often doing a large proportion of their total business with a small number of other co-transactors, and thus build up a reservoir of information and a sanctioning power in the shape of the possibility of discontinuing business relations. Given the large size of these 'inter-business' transactions in comparison with the transactions in consumer goods and services, it is here that one should focus attention when looking for the social basis of market behaviour. It is these 'inter-business' trust relations which need to be expanded if the market is to expand and prosper; consumer markets are of secondary importance.

(2) Reputation mechanisms -- but institutional and corporate rather than individual reputation mechanisms -- may play a significant role in transactions conventionally characterised as 'impersonal' or 'anonymous', especially in 'advanced' societies. One kind of example can be drawn from characteristically 'simple' consumer markets, although institutional reputation mechanisms are just as important in inter-business markets. When we buy branded washing powder from any convenient supermarket, we, the consumers, feel anonymous and that the exchange is impersonal. As a statement about the immediate social quality of the transaction, this is generally true. But reputation mechanisms are nevertheless (potentially) at work. The producer of the washing powder, the wholesaler and the retailer will all have tried to store the product in a dry environment and otherwise keep it in good condition because their reputations are at stake. If consumers find that they are buying damp powder, someone is liable to get the blame, and someone's future business will be at stake. It is partly because of the wide 'technical' scope for opportunism in the production and retailing of products such as washing powder that consumers go for a small number of brands. This helps provide assurance of quality.(2) In addition to the law and whatever degree of 'generalised morality' may be operative, these kind of reputation mechanisms provide powerful self-interest imperatives for honest dealing.(3)

Platteau's belief in the need for 'generalised morality' is based in part on an assessment that personal reputation mechanisms are too weak to order market behaviour effectively, especially in advanced societies. Once we take into account the two points above -- the importance of inter-business markets in which personal reputation mechanisms are common, and the emergence of institutional reputation mechanisms -his argument appears to lose force. We can all agree that most markets depend on some degree of 'generalised morality'. But we do not need the hypothesis about particularly abundant endowments of 'generalised morality' to explain the successful establishment of advanced market order in some places. Market order can be produced incrementally through the experience of market transactions themselves.

THE EVIDENCE

My suggestion is that 'modern' markets depend heavily on reputation mechanisms, both the 'socially embedded' interpersonal mechanisms with which Platteau deals, and 'impersonal' institutional reputation mechanisms. My evidence? My own views were shaped in part by the experience of doing research with businesspeople in Sri Lanka, in particular by having the principles of (personal) 'reputation mechanisms' explained to me by a businessman long before I had heard of the term. Zucker's work on institutional reputation mechanisms cited in note 3 is important. There are a number of case studies of personal reputation mechanisms, some of which Platteau cites. But the evidence to make my case is not available, because we know very little about the social content of economic transactions in general.

Why is more evidence not available? Part of the reason is that businesspeople tend to be secretive about these issues. Who they transact with, and under what conditions and understandings, constitute valuable and confidential pieces of information. In the absence of more than fragmentary evidence about non-consumer transactions, our images of markets are heavily influenced by the information from consumer markets that is available to us.(4) But we also have limited information about the social content of markets because researchers have not asked for it. And that is because our ideas and theories about society have told us that these issues are not problematic or not worthy of investigation. Here one can identify two distinct sets of culprits.

The first is the mainstream tradition of neo-classical economics. As Albert Hirschman has explained so neatly, the economists painted themselves into a corner with their paradigm of perfect competition. The case that there is a substantial social or interpersonal content to market transactions

. . . cannot be made for the ideal market with perfect competition. The economists' claims of allocative efficiency and all-round welfare maximisation are strictly valid only for this market. Involving large numbers of price-taking anonymous buyers and sellers supplied with perfect information, such markets function without any prolonged human or social contact among and between the parties. Under perfect competition there is no room for bargaining, negotiation, remonstration or mutual adjustment and the various operators that contract together need not enter into recurrent or continuing relationships as a result of which they would get to know each other better |Hirschman, 1982: 1473^.

The perfect competition paradigm has however been around for a long time. The original paint has dried, and over the last decade or two the economists have been busy redecorating their premises in a way that is rapidly liberating them from their self-imposed constraint. I refer to the rapid growth of the 'New Institutional Economics', founded upon the exploration of the idea of 'transactions costs'. Unlike in the neo-classical paradigm, transactions are no longer treated as costless. Costs may be incurred in obtaining information, in negotiating, in obtaining initial market access, and in 'policing' agreements |Hodgson, 1988^. Once they explore these issues, New Institutional Economists begin to talk the same language as economic sociologists investigating the 'social embeddedness' of market transactions |Granovetter and Swedburg, 1992; Hirschman, 1982: 1474^. Both might see that it makes sense for an importer of garments into the United States to rely entirely for supplies on second cousins who own factories in Hong Kong, Fiji and Nigeria rather than negotiate every deal afresh with a wide range of potential suppliers. Each side can expect the other to be reasonably honest about costs and prices, to be flexible in extending credit on the basis of a phone call when it is needed, and to volunteer useful information about market trends. Such 'networks' of privileged trust, conceptually located somewhere between pure market or pure hierarchical forms, are not confined to Asian trading communities or to the small Jewish groups that manage the world's diamond processing industry from Amsterdam; they are widespread even in 'modern' business |Powell, 1990^.(5)

The economists' blindness to the significance of the social content of economic transactions appears to be healing. The other set of culprits responsible for the researchers' long neglect of this issue continue however to be influential. These are most of the major social theorists of 'modernisation' or 'development', including for example Marx, Weber and Sombart.(6) While each has looked at the market from a different perspective and with different concerns, they have collectively sustained and elaborated a suspicion of the social implications of market transactions which (a) is widespread in popular culture, (b) is exaggerated and biased, and (c) has discouraged sociologists from taking the market seriously as a social phenomenon. There are a number of related yet conceptually distinct ideas. They may be presented as follows:

(1) The first and most fundamental is the dualist notion that 'market relations' and 'social relations' are different in kind. Market relations are essentially motivated by self-interest, which may be given the ugly gloss of 'greed' or the more benign gloss of 'material necessity'. 'Social relations' ('family', 'community', neighbours', 'friends') are driven by different motives; they are more valuable and fundamental. (Incidentally, the title of Platteau's article -- 'Behind the Market Stage Where Real Societies Exist' -- expresses this dualism.)

(2) Economic development involves both the increasing differentiation between the 'economic' and the 'social' and the increasing anonymity of market transactions.

(3) There is real antagonism between 'the market' and 'social relations'. The spread of the market continually threatens to erode social relationships, and thus 'society' generally.

The Marxian polemic about the 'cash nexus' is no more than a highly spiced and intellectualised expression of a widespread presumption:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value....

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation' |Marx and Engels, 1848: 44-5^.

None of these ideas are completely misplaced; market relations can be corrosive of what is good and valuable. But they can also be constructive. A proposition which contains an important degree of truth and is of great heuristic value -- that the expansion of impersonal market relations is a defining feature of modernisation -- has been transmuted into a literal claim that market relations are essentially impersonal.(7) There is however an alternative, minority tradition in social thought, rarely explored, which sees the market as a means of constructing desirable patterns of social relations. Hirschman has done us a great favour by exhuming this tradition. Starting in the eighteenth century, he cites Montesquieu, Concordet, Thomas Paine, David Hume and Adam Smith:

There is here then the insistent thought that a society where the market assumes a central position for the satisfaction of human wants will produce not only considerable new wealth . . . but would generate as a by-product, or external economy, a more 'polished' human type -- more honest, reliable, orderly, and disciplined, as well as more friendly and helpful, ever ready to find solutions to conflicts and a middle ground for opposed opinions |Hirschman, 1982: 1465^.

. . . to the extent that society is in need of moral values such as 'truth, trust, etc.' for its functioning, these values were confidently expected to be generated, rather than eroded, by the market, its practices and incentives' |Hirschman, 1982: 1467^.

Hirschman traces the same ideas about the integrative effect of market relations through more contemporary theorists, finding them for example in the works of Georg Simmel, who is more widely known for his work on the alienating effect of the money economy |Hirschman, 1982: 1472^.(8)

This minority tradition appears to have had little influence. Sociologists seem generally to have viewed themselves as guardians of a distinct and valuable sphere of human life under threat from the market. Some were willing to argue that the market needed society as a base for its operations; but the notion that the market feeds off this very base, and is thus in continual danger of undermining itself by destroying its social base has proved far more popular than the idea that commercial relations could be the catalysts for, or seeds of, social relations. Neither idea is inherently more plausible than the other |Hirschman, 1982: 1466-70^.

A final word about evidence: even from the meagre stock we have available, much is unreliable because based on conjecture, and ultimately on doctrine. To be even-handed, let me identify two such cases among the sources that Platteau cites, one from each side of the present argument. In his discussion of 'embeddedness', bilateral reputation mechanisms and all that, Platteau discusses the work of Greif |1992^, a New Institutional Economist, on the (Jewish) Maghribi trading community scattered around the (Muslim) Mediterranean in the Eleventh Century. Greif argues the importance of the interpersonal trust based in the Maghribis' community and religious organisation in reducing transactions costs; they could rely on one another. Platteau accepts Greif's analysis, questioning whether it explains as much about 'the rise of the West' as Greif appears to claim. Better perhaps to have looked at the evidential basis of Greif's argument. For, as Greif admits, it is essentially deductive and conjectural.(9) Given the great difficulties contemporary researchers face in getting businesspeople to talk about these issues of trust and of the social dimension of market relations, it would be deeply impressive to have detailed and solid evidence from the eleventh century!

On the other side, and more significantly, Platteau aligns himself with Weber, the most prominent exponent of the 'generalised morality' thesis. Weber believed that socio-cultural features of 'Western' society led to a high degree of resolution of the market order problem and thus general economic progress in the West. Briefly, his argument was that traditional economic morality was dualistic: fair dealing within the local 'moral community', and ruthless exploitation of strangers. Christianity, especially Protestantism, played a role in promoting the market and thus capitalism by ending this dualism. On the one side, the spirit of calculation entered into the relationship among those who were socially very close. On the other side, Christianity helped bring about a universal respect for all human beings that broke down the old distinction between those within and those outside the moral community. It became fair dealing for all in commercial transactions |Bendix, 1966: 71^. It is a neat argument, which Platteau terms 'a fine observation' (section II), but one for which Weber had no evidence:

All of this, of course, is empirically dubious. Weber documents his argument with an unconvincing mixture of fictitious illustrations, composite instances drawn from diverse times and places, and anecdotal empirical examples . . . had Weber actually attempted to investigate empirically the economic conduct and motives of medieval businessmen and artisans, or those early modern capitalists and labourers, he would have found the data difficult to unearth and ambiguous where it existed |Marshall, 1982: 45^.

That is perhaps the most honest note on which to stop.

NOTES

1. I also note that these conceptual problems appear to have come about in part because, in addition to the set of distinctions examined here, Platteau employs another, crosscutting conceptual distinction. This is the distinction between (a) 'generalised morality' and (b) the 'embeddedness thesis' -- an explanation of the social basis of market order, closely associated with Granovetter |Granovetter and Swedburg, 1992^, 'based on the existence of long-run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors' (Platteau's Summary). The problem is that the embeddedness thesis covers all the mechanisms in Platteau's category (C) but only some of them in category (D), and he does not discuss the relationship between the two sets of categorical distinctions.

2. There are connections between the efficacy of reputation mechanisms and firm size. A consumer may rationally prefer to deal with a large bank of which s/he has no direct experience, on the grounds that a large bank (a) has more to lose if it does breach trust and is exposed; and (b) probably only grew large by being trustworthy. The mechanisms are however more complex: a large bank may prove more adept than a small one at suppressing the dissatisfactions of a single client.

3. There is some literature on the emergence of institutional reputation mechanisms in advanced societies. Zucker, for example, has researched in detail 'the production of trust' (emphasis added) in the United States between 1840 and 1920: '. . . disruption of trust through such factors as high rates of immigration, coupled with pressure to engage in transactions across group boundaries and geographic distance, caused the production of trust structures within and between firms designed to supplement trust' |Zucker, 1986: 54^.

Of the four categories of new trust-producing mechanisms that Zucker identifies, only two are directly relevant to the present argument:

Second, professional certification became widespread, with credentialing replacing informal 'reputation'. Third, a distinctive economic sector, the social overhead capital sector . . . or producer services, . . . arose to bridge transactions between firms, and between individuals and firms. This sector includes banking, insurance, government, real estate and legal services |Zucker, 1986: 55^.

4. I also suggest that our perceptions of consumer markets are heavily influenced by those relatively rare but difficult transactions that are non-repeated and involve (a) substantial sums of money, (b) a co-transactor who is a small scale operator relatively invulnerable to loss of institutional reputation, and (c) a product whose quality is inherently variable and subject either to limited verification or verification at high cost. Purchasing a second-hand car is an excellent case.

5. Students of the modern Japanese economy go further, arguing that these long term privileged inter-firm relationships are an important component of economic success |Dore, 1983; Hester, 1991^.

6. For comments on Marx and Weber see the main text; for Sombart see |Sombart, 1911/1962^.

7. A close reading of Platteau's section I suggests that he takes the proposition literally.

8. As Hirschman implies |1982: 1471-2^, Durkheim was potentially a major theorist of the integrative effect of market relations through his conception of a shift from mechanical to organic bases of social solidarity as a result of the division of labour. But Durkheim never actually specified in full his conception of the bases of organic solidarity in advanced societies, and concentrated on a detailed exploration of but one of them -- the legal system.

9. For example:

Since trade relations were expected to repeat, one may conjecture (emphasis added, MPM) that a bilateral reputation mechanism in which a merchant whose rights were abused ceased trading, or an uncoordinated multilateral reputation mechanism in which a subgroup larger than the one that was abused ceased trading, could surmount this commitment problem |Greif, 1992: 129^.

His argument is in line with the strong doctrinal preference that many New Institutional Economists have for finding evidence that society can organise itself without need for the state; but that neither makes it right nor wrong.

REFERENCES

Bendix, R., 1966, Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait, London: Methuen.

Dore, R., 1983, 'Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism'. British Journal of Sociology, Vol.34, No.4, pp.459-82.

Granovetter, M. and R. Swedburg. 1992, The Sociology of Economic Life. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Greif, A., 1992, 'Institutions and International Trade: Lessons from the Commercial Revolution.', American Economic Review. Vol.82, No.2, pp. 128-33.

Hester, W.C., 1991, Japanese Takeovers: The Global Contest for Corporate Control, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Hirschman, A.O., 1982, 'Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?', Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.20, Dec. pp.1463-84.

Hodgson, G.M., 1988, Economics and Institutions, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marshall, G., 1982. In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press.

Marx, K. and F. Engels, 1848, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow: Progress Publishers (1952).

Powell, W., 1990, 'Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization', Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 12, pp.295-366.

Sombart, W., 1911/1962, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, New York: Collier Books.

Zucker. L., 1986, 'Production of Trust: Institutional Sources of Economic Structure, 1840-1920', Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol.8, pp.53-111.
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