Coordination is work. Growing up, I was quite confused about the need for mechanisms of coordination (money, management, social norms...) which all come with real costs. The confusion resolved for each only when I finally understood how they did required work for coordination.
Interestingly, these coordination mechanisms seem to be "ontologically basic". I'm not sure we've invented a fourth kind. Money/market coordination, centralized/hierarchical coordination, and distributed/norm coordination. They all have upsides and downsides.
You can blend the three together in various ways, and almost all real systems use some combination of each. I think it's interesting to consider how each of them feels controlling, although in a different way.
Hierarchy? Slave to the boss. Markets? Slave to Moloch and optimization. Norms? Slave to your super ego's psychic prison.
It really makes me wonder...is there a fourth form, waiting to be tapped? Three is an awkward number though. One makes clear sense. Two gives you a continuum or binary. But with three, you want to know...why not four?
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