"Economists typically talk about “transaction costs” but I’m deliberately using the term “coordination costs”. Transactions (a la Coase) typically involve money, and certainly require at least contractual obligations. Coordination by contrast only depends on voluntary cooperation. Transaction costs will always be higher than coordination costs, because transactions require the ability to enforce the terms of the transaction. This imposes additional costs — often enormously larger costs.
cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”). When we start to pay people for a particular “transaction” then that becomes culturally coded as a “market logic”–market logics are in effect. This signifies to the person a set of meanings: