The Listening Edge

Abstract

Thirteen chapters have circled one thing from several sides. It is worth saying plainly what it is. Every living whole, a cell, a person, a household, a firm, a market, a society, has an edge where it meets what it depends on. The edge does two jobs at once. It holds the whole together, so that what is inside stays organised. And it lets things through, materials, money, people, information, so that the whole knows what is happening around it and can respond. Karl Polanyi's word for a market whose edge is working was embedded . Albert Hirschman's three words, exit , voice and loyalty , describe how that edge senses: by losing members, by hearing them, and by holding them long enough to hear. The book's claim has been that these are not two ideas but one, seen from two distances, and that the place to read the health of a market, a firm or a household is the moment when somebody has something to say. Chapter 2 traced the idea to its sources. Chapter 3 let the critics narrow it. Chapter 4 read it as a membrane, a breathing rhythm and a root system.