Each evening during their hunting season, the Naskaupi Indians of the
Labrador Peninsula determined where they would look for game on the next
day's hunt by holding a caribou shoulder bone over the fire. By following
the daily divergent map of smoke on the caribou bone they introduced a
randomizing element to avoid locking in to early successes that, while
taking them to game in the short run, would have depleted the caribou stock
in that quadrant and reduced the likelihood of successful hunting in the
long run.
As the economist's variant of "hunt tomorrow where we found
game today," neoliberals recommend that the postsocialist economies
adopt a highly
stylized version of the institutions of prices and property that have "worked
well in the West." But limiting the search for effective organizational
forms to that familiar Western quadrant of tried and proven arrangements
locks in the postsocialist economies to exploiting known territory at the
cost of forgetting (or never learning) the skills of exploring for new
solutions.
The lesson from Labrador is not that policy makers should select institutions with a roll of the dice but that institutional friction that retards quick "transition" to a foreshortened and already designated future can preserve organizational diversity. Institutional legacies are not simple residues of the past but are resources for the future as they hold open recombinant strategies of innovation.
The resulting clash of social orders will sound discordant. But to
still that noisy clash by the ascendency of one accounting, with profitability
as the sole metric and markets as the only coordinating mechanism, would
be to destroy the heterogeneity of organizing principles that is the basis
not simply of short term adaptation but, more importantly, of longer term
adaptability.
David Stark is an economic sociologist studying organizational innovation. During the early mid-1980s, he conducted field research in a number of Hungarian factories examining a system of internal subcontracting in which actors mixed bureaucratic and market principles. After 1989 he continued to monitor property changes in these same enterprises and constructed a large data base on the ownership structure of the largest 200 enterprises and top 25 banks in Hungary. These studies developed a critique of "designer capitalism" and highlighted the recombinant or mixed property forms of the postsocialist era. His recent efforts to bring together network analysis and evolutionary theory are presented in Restructuring Networks in Postsocialism (Oxford University Press, 1997), co-edited with Gernot Grabher. With Laszlo Bruszt he has just completed a comparative study of democratization and marketization, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1998). David Stark is Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University with appointments in the Department of Sociology and School of International and Public Affairs.
