Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: A Framework for the Intimate and Extended Orders

Even notable free market scholars in the 20th Century lamented the inescapable decline in intimate social relations that would emerge from the wide-scale adoption of an extended market order. This paper challenges this view that markets erode social relations by challenging the concept that the usage of money or barter are the logical distinction between the intimate and extended order, and then by offering the framework of exit, voice, and loyalty as an improved distinction between the intimate and extended order. With this new framework, it is possible to see that the extended market order can not only preserve the intimate order, by reducing material strain on the intimate order, but also extend the intimate order, by creating the shared social space for the formation of harmonious relations between diverse people. Rather than undermining intimate social relations, market exchange preserves and extends the intimate order.

Find the article at Studies in Emergent Order.