Beyond the Market by Beckert Jens Harshav Barbara

Author:Beckert, Jens, Harshav, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

FOUR

NIKLAS LUHMANN: THE ECONOMY AS AN AUTOPOIETIC SYSTEM

Thinking economically means the ability to translate into the language of price.

—Niklas Luhmann

IN the debate overthe works ofEmile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons in the field of economic sociology, it was clearthat, in the context to explain the development of stable social structures of order, both authors deal with questions of cooperation, which can be connected with the problems of economic theory discussed in chapter 1. For Durkheim, the paramount issues involved not questions of the efficiency of economic structures but rather considerations about overcoming the contemporary socioeconomic crises and the demand for a just social order. For Parsons, too, the starting question on a metatheoretical level was inherent in the problem of explaining social order, but the works in economic sociology of the 1950s try to show that the social embedding of economic structures is also a necessary prerequisite for the efficient fulfillment of adaptive functions. Both authors refer to the significance of socially obligatory norms or a system of values, and the significance of social structures—even though it was not well developed—is emphasized by Durkheim. The theoretical tradition represented by Durkheim and Parsons shows the significance of the institutional stabilization of interaction and social structures for overcoming the action dilemma so clearly underlined in game theory. Moreover, the concept of interpenetration in Parsons provides a theoretical understanding of why action in economic contexts can never be completely detached from the rationality of other social areas and why economic institutions are influenced by the functional needs of other subsystems. The conception that concentrated on examining boundary interchanges helps to understand why the economy is not to be conceptualized as an autonomous and separate sphere of action, as in orthodox economic theory, but is always to be examined in the context of reproducing the social order as the embedding of economic action represented in the concept of interpenetration allows a positive answer to the question of the possibility of introducing values and socially shared norms into situations of economic action, which can also be a prerequisite for cooperation.

But what about the problem of action under conditions of fundamental uncertainty? The problem for economic theory that results from uncertainty, as was argued in chapter1, was that it is not possible foractor s to deduce the optimal choice because the assumptions forthe maximizing postulate are not given. The question resulting from this was how actors who are interested in maximizing their individual utility or profit make decisions underthis condition. What do we do when we cannot know which decision maximizes ourutility?

In classical sociological theory, a concern with this problem is only suggested. In Durkheim, a debate with the economic theory of action takes place only in reference to the question of explaining social order on the basis of utility maximizing. But the assumptions of economic theory are not questioned critically with regard to the information available to the actors. Only in one place, in chapter 7, book I of The Division of Labor in Society, does

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