Title

Community Currencies as Integrative Communication Mediafor Evolutionist Institutional Design

Author(s)Nishibe, Makoto

Citation

Discussion Paper, Series A, 236: 1-18

Issue Date

2011-02

URL

http://hdl.handle.net/2115/44843

RightsTypebulletin (article)

Additional
Information

Instructions for use

Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers : HUSCAPDiscussion Paper, Series A, No. 2011-236

Community Currencies as Integrative
Communication Media for
Evolutionist Institutional Design
Makoto Nishibe
February, 2011

Graduate School of Economics & Business Administration
Hokkaido University
Kita 9 Nishi 7, Kita-Ku, Sapporo 060-0809, JAPANCommunity Currencies as Integrative Communication
Media for Evolutionist Institutional Design
Makoto NISHIBE
Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration
Hokkaido University
nishibe@econ.hokudai.ac.jp
0. Introduction

The purpose of this article is to show that community currencies (CCs hereafter)
prevailing worldwide since 1990s can be interpreted as integrative communication
media, and that, since money is the most indispensable media of modern capitalistic
market economy, CCs should be strategic targets for evolutionist institutional design inorder to solve current social and economic problems caused by global capitalism. We will
also show that the case for CCs exemplifies the possibility and feasibility of evolutionist
institutional design in contrast with such other approaches as constructivist andoperationalist institutional design.

Firstly, we explicate communication media and situate money and language as such,and then show that we can comprehend CCs as integrative communication media withdual aspects of money and language. Secondly, we introduce some such basic concepts ofevolutionary economics as replicators and interactors and illustrate the model ofMicro-Meso-Macro loop by using those concepts. Thirdly, we elucidate the significanceand possibility of evolutionist institutional design as policy application of suchtheoretical ideas as we have seen, and finally investigate why and how CCs can be
strategic platform media in evolutionist institutional design.

In this article I shall present the summary with synthesis and refinement of theoriginal basic ideas and arguments that firstly appeared in a series of my Japanese
articles (Nishibe, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2010).

1. Money and Language as communication media

In order to redefine the characteristics of CCs as integrative communication media in
the next section, we, first of all, refer to Niklas Luhmann’s ideas and classifications of‘communication media’ (Luhmann, 1984, 1988).

Luhmann defines society as an autopoietic or self-reproducing system of communication
and regards economy, politics, science, education and religion etc. as partial systems ofsociety in which each of different symbolically generalized communication media
functions independently. Here communication is conceived not as transferring
information from a sender to a receiver but as emergent integrity of three selections of
information, transmission and understanding.

We have to pay attention that the word ‘media’ has a wider connotation than it isconventionally

used

for

mass

media,

meansoftransmission

ormediators.

Communication media are emergent entities in evolution that enable to transform
uncertainty into certainty of communication and are classified into three types: 1)‘language’ that enables communication for the meaning by using auditory and visualsigns, 2) such ‘extended media’ as documents, printing and communication technologies
that extend reach of communication by language, and 3) such ‘symbolically generalized
media’ as money, truth, power, love and norms. Each of these communication media
concerns uncertainty in terms of understanding, reach and attainment (acceptance),
respectively. Symbolic generalization functions to mediate differences and bindseparations, but diabolic generalization functions to create differences and separate
each other. Normally, these two functions are tightly interwoven.

We further investigate the difference between money and language based on the
Luhmann’s ideas that we have just seen. Money and language are ‘artificial media’ thatare the products of social and cultural evolution and are isomorphic in ‘generalization’of differences in time, events and societies. The decisive difference between money andlanguage is that, while money is ‘uniform media’ that condense qualitative diversity
and complexity of commodities into one-dimensional information as prices, language is‘diverse media’ that enables far richer expressions maintaining variety and complexity.

The form of payment by money involves much simpler structures than that of statementof by language. Money as measure of value can reduce complexity in a real world to
one-dimensional value and the form of payment functions as symbolically generalized
media so that it can encourage division of labor and knowledge as well as new
discoveries and innovations, and facilitate the sales of a great amount and variety ofmerchandises in the market.

Money, at the same time, brings about diabolic generalization that expressing
everything in uniform prices destroys characteristic properties and qualitative diversity
in terms of cultures, values and norms peculiar to nations, local communities andgroups of individuals. This problem has become more serious, as more individuals havebecome to use money as capital only for the purpose of value augmentation andaccumulation, and not only practices of investment and speculation spread but also
such ways of thinking as opportunity costs and human capital prevail in recent years.
This means that the consciousness of people gradually approaches to that of capitalists.
Women and mothers have become to regarded domestic labor and childcare asopportunity loss of wage earnings outside families more and more. People tend to thinkthat not only various licenses but also higher education and learning are investment in
human capital at present for gaining increase of future income. Such changes in value
and consciousness accelerate to dissolve such communities as universities and families
into the market. We will examine afterwards what solution CCs as integrative
communication media can attempt to give to the aforementioned problems.

2. CCs as ‘integrative communication media’

Let us now take a look at how we can describe CCs in view of such communication
media as language and money as discussed above. First of all, we have to pay attention
to the unique characteristics of CCs in this respect.

CCs certainly have both aspects of ‘money’ and ‘language’ just like the God in ancient
Roman mythology, ‘Janus,’ that has two faces looking forward and backward. CCs
actually are syntheses of these two factors, but tend to have stronger economic

connotations because of the attached word ‘money’ or ‘currency.’ In order to clarify thatCCs stretch over not only economic domains but also social and cultural domains, wename them ‘integrative communication media’ since they are endowed both with thecharacters of ‘economic media’ as money and those of ‘social and cultural media’ aslanguage.

Luhmann thinks of the whole society as an autopoietic system of communication anddivides it into several subsystems according to such communication media as money,
truth, power and others. We also regard CCs as belonging to the same category, but
think that they are unique in the following senses. They possess the main purpose ofvitalizing both local economy and local community, and express and convey the values,
interests and ethics shared by members of community, different from conventional
money that specializes in economic functions, so that CCs are not merely language andextended media but also such symbolic generalized communication media as love andnorms. Accordingly, CCs are found to have all properties of three kinds ofcommunication media. This is the reason why we have just put the adjective‘integrative’ on the top of it.

Table 1 shows dual properties of CCs as integrative communication media. First, let us
put our eyes on the economic aspect at the left-hand sides of the table.

The money side indicates its ability of one-dimensionally expressing and evaluating adiversity of heterogeneous goods and services by some magnitude on a single scale, say,‘green dollar.’ Sellers, on the one hand, set prices of goods and services and wait forbuyers to come, and buyers, on the other, observe the prices and decide to purchasethem if the buyers want them and consider they are not dear. Such unit transactions ofbuying and selling constitute the market as networks of consecutive transactions
mediated by money as the means of circulation.

CCs naturally involve such one-dimensional expressions and evaluations so long as
goods and services are priced in terms of them. Then we can see that CCs as economic
media create a different kind of market from that in capitalistic market economies. It is
often thought that CCs create communities not markets, but it is not true. CCs have themoney side aiming at exchange with reciprocity, i.e. ‘reciprocal exchange’, and aresupposed to form competitive and cooperative, that is, ‘coopetitive’ local markets inconsideration to another side of social and cultural media. In order to understand thatmarkets can include altruistic and bounded-rational agents and cooperative relations
among such agents, it is necessary to widen the conventional vision of the market
depicted in neoclassical economics, which is composed of selfish and super-rational
agents and perfectly competitive relations among such agents.

CCs as Integrative Communication Media
Sides

Money (Economic media)

Language (Social and cultural media)

Purposes

Vitalization of local economy

Rehabilitation of community(autonomy, circulation,	
 (dialogue, interchange, commitment)

recycling)
Functions

Forms

Independent design, issuing andFerment of trust and reciprocity

administration

Cooperative ‘prosumers’

Bounded sphere circulation

Linguistic expression and

No interest or minus interest

transmission

Complementary currencies andMutual-help coupons

Emergency currencies(Time Dollars, Eco-money)(Stamp scrip, LETS)
Domains

MarketCommunity(Table 1) Dual properties of CC as integrative communication media

Let us now turn our attention to ‘social and cultural aspect’ written on the right-handside of Table 1. This can be also called ‘linguistic side.’ All human relations utilize
languages and numbers complementarily. Money quantitatively expresses andevaluates everything in prices, so it is ‘one-dimensional media’ different from‘multi-dimensional media’ that language represents. CCs express and convey a diversityof social values, norms and cultures peculiar to the issuing and administrative bodies
and local communities in circulation.

CCs have the purposes, functions, forms and spheres according to these two sides. The
purpose of CCs as economic media is ‘to vitalize local economy.’

It is said that one of

the causes for depression and unemployment in local communities is the problem thatmoney flow out of local communities and eventually run short to circulate in them. For
example, Japan have experienced several sever depressions during more than 20 years
since the collapse of bubble economies in 1990. Even though Japan as a whole sufferedfrom economic depressions, there was a considerably big gap between large city areas
and other regional areas in term of the rate of bankruptcy and the rate ofunemployment depending on the interregional balance of payments and the industrial
structure. As a whole, regional areas are in a much severer position than large city
areas.

All towns and villages have the same problem of declining shopping street in addition to
the problems of depopulation and aging population caused by falling birthrate andspillover of the youth to urban areas where they find more job opportunities. While
motorization facilitated local people going for shopping in a supermarket or a shopping
mall in larger towns, it, on the other side, gave rise to ‘shopping refugees’ of the elderly
who do not drive cars and cannot go for shopping nearby. When local shopping streets
disappear, so do such many invisible community functions that they serve as street
cleaning, mutual aids, childcare and festivals. As a result, the decline of local economies
accelerated and the living environments for all residents deteriorated as well. If thepeople under such circumstances can create their own local money that stay in thecommunity so that they can make it circulate within their communities, it would be able
to make local economies more active and relatively independent of the influence ofnational and global economies. It would encourage forming a sustainable and recycling
local economies of ‘local production for local consumption’. This is the ultimate aim of
CCs introduced as ‘economic media.’

Another purpose of CCs, on the other hand, is to ‘activate community’ or ’activate
communication and intercourse.’ This corresponds to ‘social and cultural media’ of CCs.
In order to deeply investigate the aspect of CC as ‘social and cultural media, ’ we have totake a roundabout fully to understand about socio-economic coordinating principles

including Market and the meaning of globalization.

In modern capitalist market economies, every conceivable thing including internalorgans, genital cells, genetic information, personal information and the right to emit
carbon dioxide has been commodified and the market domain has increasingly
expanded and deepened.

Here, in order to make clear the meaning of so-called ‘globalization’ since 1990s, we
introduce three different coordinating principles of socio-economy, according to K.
Polanyi (1944) and with some modifications: 1) Market (the private domain of exchange
and freedom), 2) Community (the common domain of reciprocity and fraternity) and 3)
State (the public domain of redistribution and equality). Let us confirm that such three
economic principles as exchange, reciprocity and redistribution exactly correspond tosuch three political ideals of French Republic, which originated from French Revolution,
as freedom (blue in color), fraternity (red in color) and equality (white in color).

Then, globalization can be interpreted as historical tendency over several decades forMarket to expand, and for Community and State to shrink, qualitatively andquantitatively, as shown in Fig. 1. In other words, globalization is manifestation of thetendency of ‘internalization’ of Market as commodification. As Marx (1859, 1867)
repetitively put it, Market emerges from between two communities, two states, or acommunity and a state. Once Market emerges from such boundaries, it expands andpenetrates into communities and states, dissolve them, and reorganize them by Market
principle. We call this tendency ‘internalization’ of Market.

The tendency is driven by capital that is the replicator (a bundle of rules) of capitalistic
market economies, neither human agents nor profit organizations as firms. So, to beprecise, Capital, the derivative of Market, dissolves Community and State and replaces
them into Market by its gradual transformation of more kinds of non-tradable goods
and services into ‘fictitious’ commodities. If globalization proceeds further up to theultimate stage, not only money and such assets as stocks and real estate but also men,
options, rights and information are all idealistically capitalized as profit-earning
opportunities.

If the ‘fiction’ is realized without any restrictions or regulations in the market, the ‘free
investment’ principle beyond ‘free trade’ is fulfilledsa as the highest level of evolution ofcapitalistic market economy. We claim that the tendency of globalization actually exists
because it is observable that all human relations tend to be reduced to only sucheconomic and contractual relations as buyer-seller and creditor-debtor relations so that
communities supported by reciprocal exchange and mutual aids would decline and evencollapse. The tendency of globalization has been and is counteracted by ‘self-protectionof society’ (Polanyi, ibid.) as in communism and anti-globalization movements.

(Fig. 1) Globalization

In order to countervail it in daily life situations, CCs can be introduced to rehabilitate
reciprocal communities and revitalize human communications. In Japan, the purposesof CCs as ‘social and cultural media’ had been emphasized as in Eco-money until the
beginning of 21st century, but more attention has been paid to the purposes of CCs as‘economic media’ since smooth circulation of Eco-money had been found difficult. We

must understand that the uniqueness of CCs lies in simultaneous and complementary
coexistence of both aspects. Next, let us see the functions of CCs as monetary media.

a) Independent design, issue and management
Any groups can independently and voluntarily design, issue and manage CCs. If people
create their own CCs and make transactions with them within a certain area, it meansthat they partially restore the right to issue money as civil liberties and social rights.
This is the liberal and democratic property of CCs.

b) Circulation in a bounded sphere

If consumers go shopping in large supermarkets or convenience stores in local areas,
the money paid flow out of the local community and concentrates in their head quarters.
The local money for saving and investment funds transfer to the more profitable place,say, some metropolitan areas where land rapidly appreciates. Such spillover of money
has negative impact on local economies especially in the period of depression. CCs aredesigned to circulate within a certain local area without flowing out of it so that it can
activate transactions of inner goods and services and eliminate shortage of effective
demand caused by hoard of money. This is the aspect of local production for local
consumption.

c) No interest or minus interest
What does no interest on CCs mean? If you borrow money from a commercial bank, youhave to repay it with given interest. But if you borrow it from your parents or friends,
you pay no interest because it shows their trust and affection to you. If you dare to pay
interest, it might destroy familiar relationships. Whether or not people lend money atinterest indicates social distance between creditors and debtors. ‘Minus interest’corresponds to the cost of holding money known as ‘demurrage’ and encourages to use
money rather than to hold it to promote consumption. This idea was embodied in Stamp
Scrips according to Silvio Gesell’s design. This is the non-capitalistic aspect of CCs.

These three aspects are the functional characteristics in view of ‘economic side’ of CCs.
When we focus on ‘social and cultural side’ of CCs, the view that CCs are the tools forovercoming hardships in severe depression and economic crisis are too narrow. Such

recent cases in Japan as Fureai Kippu (Touch Each Other Tickets) and Eco-money are
the examples that attach greater importance to the linguistic side of CCs. Let us now
consider such an aspect.

d) Trust and cooperation
CCs circulate based on trust and cooperation among participants. Participants interact
each other through transactions, strengthen links of mutual aids and deepen trust
among them. This is the community forming aspect of CCs.

e) Cooperative prosumers
A ‘prosumer’ is a compound word combining a producer and a consumer made by Alvin
Toffler (1980) that characterizes the tendency of economic lives to become more self-help
or DIY in the third wave, the modern information age. ‘Cooperative prosumers’ imply
that the citizens who are simultaneously producers and consumers keep cooperative
relationships to mutually help each other and thereby effectively utilize resources theyown. This expresses the ideal of CCs that all participants should stand on the equal
footing as much as possible by eliminating asymmetry between consumers as moneyowners and producers as money seekers.

f) Linguistic expression and transmission
Each local community has an intrinsic diversity of culture and nature that cannot bemeasured in one-dimensional quantity of money. CCs are introduced and used as socialand cultural media to express and transmit such individuality of community and local
district. There are many unique names of CCs to shortly express such identities as
specialty, dialect, geography, tradition, mythology and ideal of communities and local
districts. CCs thus function as linguistic media regarding local culture, interest andvalue.

CCs have always two sides of economic media and social and cultural media, and suchduality of CCs is the most indispensible property as communication media that wecannot find in any other ones. So we cannot truly understand the significance of CCs byviewing them only from either side. However, CCs usually vary depending on which sideis stronger or more contained in them. CCs further vary depending on a diversity ofpurposes and localities. While CCs evolved as a new species from money and language,
a diversity of subspecies of CCs emerged. The behaviors and motivations of participants
and the performance and patterns of communities composed of participants interact
and change each other as time goes on. Such endogenously dynamic changes are
considered to be path-dependent and unrepeatable. Accordingly, we cannot ask which
form of CC is the best or the most effective of all CCs because such a question ismeaningless in the dynamical evolutionary process.

The aim of CCs is to control negative effects of money as capital (Luhmann’s diabolic
generalization)andrestorestability

andsustainabilityofsocio-economy

byintentionally restraining its universal validity with respect to circulating space-time,transaction objects and participants. If such incredibly weaker CCs compared withcurrent national currencies can survive in evolutionary processes, they would graduallyaffect interests, value, norms, ethics and routines of participants.

Metaphorically speaking, therefore, CCs are similar to slow-acting Eastern medicine for
improving physical condition as in acupuncture, rather than fast-acting Western
medicine for such symptomatic treatment as in medication. In other words, CCs, byinserting microscopic exogenous material in the immune system or the nervous systemof a human body, aim to give subtle changes to the phases between order and chaos on
the region boundary of a system and, consequently, activate each cell in order to vitalize
the body system as a whole. We will explain the point more analytically from theviewpoint of evolutionist institutional design in the next section.

3. Evolutionist Institutional Design

Evolutionist institutional design is an applied policy method in evolutional economics
that is a different approach from conventional economics and focuses on evolution ofsocial institutions. It tries to show an original and effective answer to the modern
difficult problems that conventional approaches cannot find suitable solutions.

As Keynesian Macroeconomic control policy lost its effectiveness in 1970s and thesocialist economic bloc in Eastern Europe and USSR collapsed in 1990s, overconfidence

in human reason was defeated. Hayek’s criticism of ‘the fatal conceit’ (Hayek, 1988) thattargeted at constructivism and scientism had dominant influences since then. Too muchemphasis had been put on fallibilism, boundedness of rationality and liberalism after
Hayek, and, as a result of it, design had become to be only negatively told until the endof 20th century. Although the concept ‘design’ in itself might imply artificial planningand construction, it is fairly possible to introduce a new way of ‘design’ based on thenatural, complex and non-deterministic properties of evolution. That is quite different
from such constructivist institutional design as in socialist economic planning or suchmechanism design as in market socialism or auction mechanism design, nor from suchoperationalist institutional design as in Keynesian ‘fine tuning’ adjustment of effective
demand. We would like to present evolutionist institutional design as a new idea andway for policy-making practices.

Here let us introduce several basic concepts and ideas in evolutionary economics so that
we can use those to clarify the aims and significances of evolutionist institutional design.
What are similar and different between biological evolution and socio-economic
evolution? Biological evolution in view of Neo-Darwinism is conceived as complex
phenomena composed by the following three different mechanisms: 1) variance via
mutation, 2) heredity, 3) natural selection. In case of socio-economic evolution,
considering the peculiar ability of Homo sapiens to learn and communicate each otherby using language and money, we need to give some important revisions to theaforementioned model of biological evolution even if we have similar three mechanism:1) variance via natural and artificial mutation (innovation), 2) replication/ transmissionof knowledge/ information, 3) natural and artificial selection (competition andcooperation). If we add 4) self-organization as another mechanism missing in
Neo-Darwinism in order to explain how order spontaneously emerges, we now have four
independent mechanisms in socioeconomic evolution.

Evolutionary economics has two basic concepts: replicators and interactors. On the one
hand, replicators in socio-economic evolution that correspond to genes or DNA in
biological evolution are institutions that consist of a bundle of rules in the form of ‘if ~then…’ shared by a relatively large number of agents. Such institutions constituted as
rules are classified from the viewpoint of agents into internal (strategies of game,frames of cognition, psychological biases and routines of behaviors) and external (rulesof game, laws, conventions, norms and morals). On the other hand, interactors as causal
agents that correspond to organism and groups or populations in biological evolution
are individuals or groups of individuals who execute rules (act according to bothinternal and external rules) and interact with themselves and others as well as outerenvironments. Then we can visualize our socio-economy as coexistence with a diversityof rules or institutions that form mutually complementary and substitutive relations.
We call such a dynamic system the ‘institutional ecology.’

In most cases, replicators and interactors form multilayered nested structures. Whileindividuals are agents with their own replicators as internal institutions (rules), suchgroups of individuals as organizations (firms), communities and states are also agentswith their own replicators that are preferentially imposed as external institutions(rules) on individual members as long as they belong to those groups. If some individual
members cannot fully accept all the rules of the belonging group, in other words, any of
the internal rules of the individual members conflict the external rules of the belonging
group, they must quit or be kicked out of the group.

(Fig 2) Multilayered nested structures composed by replicators and interactors

Fig. 2 depicts an example of multilayered nested structure. Three individuals(interactors 1j, 2j and ij symbolized by three small circles) with their own replicators asinternal rules for cognition and behavior (replicators 1j, 2j and ij symbolized by threesmall rectangles in small circles, respectively) belong to an organization (interactor jsymbolized by a big circle) with its own replicators (replicator j symbolized by arectangle at the center of a big circle) as external rules for laws, norms and morals.

We now present another model with three levels of ‘Micro-Meso-Macro loop’ to describe
dynamic characters of an evolutionary system as in Fig. 3. Such symbolicallygeneralized communication media as language, law and money can be regarded as
platform institutions (basic replicators) located on the Meso level in Fig. 3 because they
determine the fundamental frames of cognition and rules of action of agents that should
be incalcated as internal rules within agents on the Micro level so that agents canbehave based on the such frames and rules. In short, platform institutions on the Meso
level basically regulate how agents on the Micro level interact one another.

(Fig. 3) Micro-Meso-Macro Loop

4. CCs as strategic platform media in evolutionist institutional design

CCs are integrative communication media located on the Meso level as well andmediate both directional causal relations between socio-economic performances andpatterns on the Macro level and behaviors of agents based on such internal rules asvalue and morals on the Micro level.

Thus if we set new rules or revise some rules of CCs as platform institutions on the
Meso level, such a change would affect socio-economic performances and patterns on the
Macro level because agents change their behaviors in a response to the change ofexternal rules even though agents keep such internal rules as frame of cognition,
motives and routines unchanged. Even though agents follow the same internal rules
written as ‘if ~ then…’ rules, if any input conditions in the subordinate clause (if~)
including any change in external rules, they might change their behaviors as output inthe main clause (then…) according to the change in the subordinate clause. But if suchinternal rules change as value, motives and routines on the micro level caused by thechange of external rules on the Meso level, then it means that agents eventually change
their ‘ways of behaviors’, not behaviors as output in the same internal rules.

For example, let us assume that you always behave as a utilitarian according to the ruleof maximization of your utility, and if the criminal laws are amended to allow you tosteal anything from others without penalty, you are supposed to start to steal things to
maximize your utility, rather than to pay money to buy things. But if you had a chance
to refrain from stealing things from others in view of the moral standard that stealing is
not right because it hurts others, you would eventually give priority to the moral
standard not the utilitarian rule and you would not behave according to the rule ofmaximization of your utility. This means that you would not change your behavior itself,
but change your internal rules, i.e., your ways to behave, even though you would behave
the same as before since you don’t steal anything both before and after the amendmentof the law.

After all, the change of external rules on the Meso level can affect not only performanceon the Macro level but also internal rules on the Micro level. Both constructivist andoperationalist approaches of conventional institutional design presume that suchinternal rules on the Micro level are all fixed as constant because such internal rules
are given by such optimality principle as maximization of utility and profits.
Constructivist approach, on the one hand, aims at constructing systems or structures on
the Macro level based on such utilitarian behavioral principle imposed on agents on theMicro level. Operationalist approach, on the other hand, aims at discretionallycontrolling fluctuation and instability of the mechanism on the Macro level.

However, different from those, evolutionist approach thinks of internal rules on the
micro level as variable, and tries to consider the effects on both performances andpatterns overall on the Macro level and internal rules on the Micro level simultaneously
caused by the policymaking alternation of such external rules embodied in platform
institutions as money and accounting on the Meso level.

Conventional national currencies are the platform institutions that determine thegrand design (basic replicators) for capitalistic market socio-economy to evolve. In
contrast with this, CCs can be thought of as different kinds of platform institutions withdifferent basic replicators that can gradually change both external and internal
institutions of agents and potentially can evolve from capitalistic market socio-economy
to non-capitalistic market-economy. Even though replicators built in CCs have highpotentials to transform capitalistic market economies into non-capitalistic ones, the real
problem is that they only have weak power for survival and prevalence. So it would bedesirable from the strategic viewpoint to consider the aforementioned dynamic
character of the Micro-Meso-Macro level of the system with CCs as platform media andput such basic ideas of evolutionist institutional design into more specific and realistic
model that can be introduced to actual administrations of CCs.

Fig. 3 shows the nested structure of institutional design with community dock.
Community dock, analogous to ‘human dock’ in Japanese that is periodic complete
medical checkup, signifies periodic complete checkup of both such subjective data as
results of questionnaires, interviews and discussions and such objective data as
statistics of transactions, turnover of money, and properties of network among
participants, etc. It is designed as part of evolutionist institutional design forembodying a strategic and systemic method of self-estimation of socio-economic
situations of the community and self-alternation of such internal rules as frames ofcognition, motives, values and norms for participating agents of CCs.

(Fig. 4) The nested structure of institutional design with community dock

Community dock is composed of the following four phases: 1) analysis and diagnosis ofcurrent performance of socio-economies of the community, 2) self-estimation andreflection on the performance of the community and their own internal rules byparticipating agents of CCs, 3) Self-alternation of their frames of cognitions, motives,
values and norms by participating agents of CCs, 4) Change of properties of CCs as
platform media.

The loop of community dock is subsumed by media design of CCs on Fig.4. This
indicates that, after sufficient numbers of repetitions of community dock, external rulesof CCs as platform media can be redesigned in order to adapt the altered internal rulesof participants and more effectively attain the initial goals. Media design of CCs is thus

situated on the upper level of community dock in the whole picture of evolutionist
institutional design.

Whether or not CCs as platform media can produce successful outcomes really dependon the overall distribution of the internal rules that participating agents have at the
moment. It is thus significant to pay attention to the dynamic process created throughimplementing community dock.

The framework of evolutionary institutional design is thus established so that we canunderstand the theoretical aspects of CCs more deeply from the more realistic
viewpoint of evolutionary economics and can present more suitable method ofself-management of CCs for their practitioners.

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