Whitford and Zeitlin

In incisive and well-informed papers Herrigel and Whitford and Zeitlin defend the pragmatic collaborations/learning-by-monitoring (PC or LBM) view of customer– supplier relations against rival interpretations, but point to defects in the argument that may be related to fundamental limitations in the whole approach. Herrigel argues that whereas LBM suggests that customer–supplier relations will converge on a single type of collaboration, the evidence is that there are, and will continue to be many variations. It is by choosing from among these types, and combining them in new hybrids, that customers and suppliers respond to and perpetuate problems of imperfect information and power disparities obscured by the LBM approach. In a similar vein Whitford and Zeitlin argue that coordination problems, of which power struggles are again part cause and part effect, will block a transition to LBM collaboration unless moderated by supra-firm governance mechanisms that reduce the chances of misunderstanding and intentional abuse. Read together, the two papers, and especially Herrigel’s, suggest that LBM may be academically useful insofar as imperial theories (one theory for each epoch, if not for the ages) can be, but also that it would be suicidal for the actors (and actor-oriented theory) to take the ideas too seriously. Since LBM is, among other things, an effort to generalize from the actors’ cooperative response to a world too volatile for traditional hierarchies and markets, this is disquieting. I respect the authors too much, and have myself seen too much of what they see to challenge their findings. In responding therefore I will try to reinterpret those findings in a way that illuminates them while developing the idea of LBM. I will argue that the diversity of customer–supplier relations results from alternative interpretations of how, under ambiguous conditions, to build the process of iterated co-design at the heart of PC, and that the ambiguity fueling the diversity is rooted in the nature of iterated co-design itself (although it may be exacerbated by other factors, starting with power disparities). Giving a parsimonious account of such variations on a theme is just what we should expect a practice-oriented theory to do. With respect to