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phatics and the nature of the firm

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It occurred to me when I was attending a talk by John Kay about "rents" in the creative sector that transaction costs are somewhat related to phatics. 

Consider the traditional roles in publishing: there's the AUTHOR, there's the PUBLISHER, and the DISTRIBUTOR.  At each step, AUTHOR->PUBLISHER and PUBLISHER->DISTRIBUTOR, DISTRIBUTOR->READER there is some transaction cost, e.g. traditionally the author has to send out letters to lots of different publishers looking for someone who will take on the manuscript, and that's a lot of work.  So, we introduce some "optimizations" and further roles, e.g. the AUTHOR might hire an AGENT who will intermediate with publishers.

Any one of these roles or connections might have some phatic dimension, but the AGENT in particular is someone who "speaks on behalf" of the author.

Coase's theory of the firm is basically that corporate bodies come into existence in order to optimize, so that rather than dealing with lots of distributed connections with external agents, they can just go "down the hallway" and talk with a colleague.  There are trade-offs here, of course, so firms don't grow beyond a certain point -- if the transaction costs with a sector are cheap, there's no reason to add that department.   Again, the corporate body seems a bit similar to the conversational space or the "phatic architecture" that allows that space to exist.

Benkler's paper "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm" takes some of the basic economics ideas and uses them to theorize open source software development, and "commons-based peer production" more broadly (a term introduced in this paper).  It'd be interesting to revisit those themes more fully from a phatics perspective.  This is just a "bookmark" reminder to come back to that again later.

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