I edit therefore I am

Feld points to an interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Fiske, a professor of anthropology at UCLA who previously taught at Penn and Bryn Mawr, has devoted decades of research to disentangling human relationships. He’s studied communities all over the world, comparing cultures in West Africa with those in Europe and America. His conclusion: Just as every human language is composed of the same grammatical elements (subjects, verbs, etc.), all relationships are built from exactly four kinds of interactions. Fiske labels these communal sharing, equality matching, authority ranking and market pricing. Here’s what he means:

• Communal sharing is how you treat your immediate family: All for one and one for all. Or as Marx put it: From each according to ability, to each according to need.
• Equality matching, by contrast, means we all take turns. From kindergarten to the town meeting, it’s all about fair shares, reciprocity, doing your part.
• Authority ranking is how tribes function, not to mention armies, corporations and governments. Know your place, obey orders, and hail to the chief.
• Market pricing, of course, is the basis of economics. It’s what we do whenever we weigh costs and benefits, trade up (or down), save or invest.

Don’t get Fiske wrong: He’s not saying that each relationship in your life fits into one of these four slots. Rather, these are paradigms - mental models - that we use to help make sense of our interactions. When there are conflicts, moreover, Fiske maintains it’s often because we aren’t all using the same model.

–> very interesting for social web!

Feld will dig the subject because he is not sure if it’s fully relevant. I have a good intuition that it is !
raising money with Vc is a combination of Authority & Market. raising money with Angels is a combination of Communal & Market. Fun? I will read Fiske’s full article and try to bring some inputs.
But I see a smart use of Marx which I think get the economics pretty straight…. These ideas can be integrated in environement (in need to think about terms …. but Infra/Super structures are a good start ;-)). We see a number of new way to ease understandings of economics …. and they’re all about micro-economy, i.e how the homo economicus is walking under the invisble hand.

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