spontaneous Social Order

A bstract . 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 Schütz. 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 Schützian insights, in that the Schützian analysis of the structures of the life-world contains a number of pertinent insights into the coordination problem.