Outra forma de "ordem espontânea"

Um artigo de 2012 de Yanis Varoufakis (o novo ministro das finanças grego) sobre a forma de organização da empresa de jogos electrónicos para qual ele trabalhou. Nessa empresa os empregados decidem eles mesmos em que projetos vão trabalhar (em vez de terem um chefe que lhes distribui tarefas), e Varoufakis apresenta isso como um tipo alternativo de "ordem espontânea", distinto da "ordem espontânea" dos economistas liberais (em que a coordenação entre uma infinidade de decisões descentralizadas é feita através do sistema de preços) e também da planificação central em miniatura que caracteriza as empresas tradicionais:

Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism! (...)

The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices. E.g. whenever the price of balloons goes up, this signals to balloon makers that ‘society’ wants more balloons. Thus they produce more, without any agency or ministry telling them to do so; without any need to concentrate in some building or server all information about people’s balloon preferences, or about the technology of producing balloons. (...)

Be that as it may, there is a twofold problem with Smith’s and Hayek’s ‘spontaneous order’: First, it restricts too heavily the scope of Hume’s original notion of an order that evolves spontaneously. Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order. In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making. Moreover, Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling. Secondly, Hayek’s argument that markets protect us from serfdom (i.e. from authoritarian hierarchies) is weakened substantially by the fact that he has precious little to say about corporate serfdom; about the hierarchies that millions must submit to (when working for Wal-Mart or Microsoft for instance) in order to make a living or to get a chance to unfold their talents. (...)

A corporation that tries to function as a type of ‘spontaneous order’ (i.e. without an internal system of command/hierarchy) seems like a contradiction in terms. Smith’s and Hayek’s spontaneous orders turn on price signals. As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced). So, if Valve’s own spontaneous order does not turn on price signals, what does it turn on?

The answer is: on time and team allocations. Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.