Economic governance and social values: The case of a major housing project

The article discusses the tension between the demands imposed by economic forms of social co-ordination, on the one hand, and the plurality of values underlying contemporary societies, on the other. The recent expansion of economic modes of governance throughout the entire fabric of social life posits a series of central social and political problems as it seeks to redefine important social values and functional domains that evade the monoethical horizon of utility and the logic of efficiency. Drawing on Luhmann's notion of the functional primacy of economy, the article attempts to understand the interaction forms of the contemporary society's highly differentiated functional domains and suggest a reasonable response to the problems associated with the expansion of economic modes of governance and co-ordination. The theoretical ideas are then recast in the form of a case study in housing that reveals the planning and construction of houses as a complex cross-functional context whose outcome is defined by the complex interaction of three major systems or institutional forces that are referred to as the games of beauty-functionality, justice and scarcity.