The Paradoxes of Global Emergence

In emergent contexts, opportunity and crisis, co-operation and competition, and order and disorder, are three different perspectives on the same thing. In response to opportunities, enterprises operating in emerging industries or markets quickly abandon the previous institutional legitimacy for any new ones that might support their activities. This throws the old institutions into crisis before any agreement exists on successor institutions. There is then a vacuum. In such conditions, which typify emergence, exchange is parlous. This seems to limit the ability of transactors to co-operate outwith a hierarchically controlled enterprise. Outside such isolated fiefdoms there is no collective framework in which to embed enterprise and mobilise the resources for accruing social capital. Both producing for emerging markets and trading in them is fraught with uncertainty and subject to extortion and to political hostility, all of which would seem to make them less attractive than the safer returns offered by existing systems. Yet both emergence and the associated institutional change comes about in the world in which enterprise is situated. How? The answer appears to be that short-term the vacuum described is bridged. This is done by any practicable scaffolding that can be found to support the constructive evolution of future co-ordinating institutions. The value that can be created during emergence is so high that in the short term the pay-offs dwarf the costs and the risks.