SPONTANEOUS SOCIAL-ORDER - ECONOMICS AND SCHUTZIAN SOCIOLOGY

This paper relates to the emerging economics/sociology-nexus, in argui ng that economists may have a lesson to learn from the work of the soc iologist Alfred Schutz. The problem of coordination, which is the prob lem of theoretically demonstrating the possibility of spontaneous orde r in society, is discussed. While conventional economics and classical game-theory have not solved or even convincingly addressed this probl em, it is explicitly addressed by Austrian and neo-institutional econo mics It is argued that these two traditions in some important aspects dovetail with Schutzian insights, in that the Schutzian analysis of th e structures of the life-world contains a number of pertinent insights into the coordination Problem.