Spontaneous social order: Economics and Schutzian sociology

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