They are the people formerly¹ known as employees. In a broad range of service industries, workers who once drew a steady salary are cutting out the employer and plying² their services direct to people who used to pay companies, rather than people, to meet their needs.

他们以前被称为雇员。在服务行业的各个领域，曾经赚取稳定工资的劳动者正在绕过雇主，把自己的服务直接提供给客户。这些客户过去一直付费给企业（而非个人）来满足自己的需求。

This is the on-demand economy, the pattern of work exemplified by online systems such as Uber, a smartphone app that matches freelance taxi drivers to city dwellers³ who need a ride. Such services promise great efficiencies; idle resources can be harnessed more easily, whether they are empty bedrooms or the working hours of the underemployed. But there is also a transfer of risk.

这就是按需经济(on-demand economy)，这种工作模式体现在优步(Uber)等在线系统上。优步是一款智能手机应用，它可以把个体出租车司机和需要出行的城市居民匹配起来。这样的服务有望带来效率的极大提高；闲置资源可以被更容易地利用起来，无论这资源是空置的卧室还是未得到充分就业的人们的工作时间。但是，这里也存在风险的转移。

In the short term, at least, company men and women were insulated from the vicissitudes⁴ of economic fortune. Whether it was faulty equipment or business ups and downs, much of the risk fell on companies rather than individuals. The on-demand economy sweeps away many of these safeguards. When misfortune strikes, workers are on their own.

至少在短期内，企业员工还不会受到经济兴衰变故的影响。不论是设备故障还是业务波动，大部分风险都由公司而非个人承担。但按需经济让许多这样的保障措施都消失了。当厄运降临时，劳动者只能自己承担。

Adam Smith explained that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. If you spend all your days putting metal heads on the end of pins, you can get very good at it. But unless there is a market in which you can trade pins for money, and others in which you can trade money for food, shelter and cloth, you will not prosper⁵ by doing so. Specialisation brings gains. Its essential precondition is a system of exchange.

亚当•斯密(Adam Smith)解释了为什么说劳动分工受到市场范围的限制。如果你整天都做把金属头镶到大头针尾部的工作，你会变得非常熟练。但除非有一个你能够用大头针换来钱的市场，以及其他你可以用钱换来吃穿住的市场，否则，你无法通过制作大头针致富。专业化能带来收益的基本前提，是存在一个交换体系。

This poses a difficulty, for markets are themselves limited. Transacting⁶ in them is costly⁷, and sometimes the cost might be so high it outweighs⁸ the value to be gained. This was the insight of the Nobel prizewinning economist⁹ Ronald Coase, and he used it to explain why humanity is not the only form of intelligent life in our economic universe. If economic exchange were intermediated exclusively via markets, all transactions could take place between people; there would be no need for companies to exist at all. But corporate¹¹ hierarchies¹² are sometimes a cheaper way of co-ordinating economic exchange.

这带来了一个难题，因为市场本身是有局限的。在市场中进行交易需要付出高昂成本，有时交易成本可能高到超过可获取的收益。这就是诺贝尔经济学奖得主罗纳德•科斯(Ronald Coase)的伟大发现，他用这一发现来解释为什么人类并非我们经济系统里唯一的智慧生命形式。如果经济交换完全经由市场作为媒介进行，那所有交易都可以在人与人之间发生；而企业完全没有存在的必要了。但企业层级结构有时能够用更低的成本协调经济交换。

The logic¹³ is immutable¹⁴, but the circumstances have changed. Ubiquitous connectivity via the internet has reduced the cost of connecting resources to the people who need them. When market exchange is no longer so expensive, corporate enterprises begin to lose their raison d’être.

这种逻辑不会变，但环境已经发生变化。互联网的四通八达降低了把资源和需要这些资源的人连接起来的成本。当交易成本不再如此高昂，企业也就开始失去存在的理由。

The earliest signs that communications technology could help orchestrate new forms of human collaboration¹⁵ were visible outside the economic sphere. In the early days of the web, most boundary-crossing work was mediated¹⁰ through social interaction, rather than markets. Peer production projects — such as Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia¹⁶ to which anyone can contribute by writing pages or editing them, or Linux, an open source operating system developed by a huge community of computer programmers who give their time for free — were first to create value on an industrial scale while breaking free of the boundary of the company. The informality and social motivations that gave rise to these practices did not require the overheads of a payment system. Nor did they require managerial hierarchies. The absence of price signals muted the potential conflicts that arise regularly between people who must allocate¹⁷ the monetary¹⁸ rewards of their shared work.

通信技术可以帮助构建新型人类合作形式的最早迹象，并非出现在经济领域。在互联网出现的早期，大部分跨界合作工作都是通过社交互动、而非市场完成的。对等协作生产(peer production)项目——如任何人都可以通过撰写或编辑页面出一份力的免费在线百科全书维基百科(Wikipedia)，或由全球大量编程人员无偿协力开发的开源操作系统Linux——第一次以工业规模创造价值，同时又打破了企业的边界。促使这些实践活动兴起的非正式性和社交动机，不需要维持一个支付系统所需的管理费用，也不需要层级管理结构。价格信号的缺失，让必须瓜分共同劳动成果带来的金钱回报的人们之间屡见不鲜的冲突也消失了。

The companies that make up the on-demand economy are similar, but price signals have taken the place of social motivations. As Coase might have predicted, the boundary of the company has been dissolved. The likely efficiency gains are large. The economic effects of Wikipedia and Linux were felt by the publishing and software industries, whose workers are likely to be well-educated and fairly well off. But the effects of the on-demand economy will reach deep into social strata¹⁹ that have less education and a limited reservoir of material security to draw on.

构成按需经济的企业是类似的，但价格信号已经取代了社交动机。正如科斯可能会预言的那样，企业的边界已经被打破。可能的效率提升非常大。出版和软件行业工作者大多受过良好教育、也相对富裕，这两个行业已经感受到了维基百科和Linux那样的经济影响。但按需经济的影响将进一步深入到受教育较少、物质保障储备有限的社会阶层。

And there is the rub. When the national labour market took shape in Victorian Britain, what followed was a century of explosive growth. But it was also a century of Dickensian depredation²⁰ and dislocation. Before we celebrate the demise²¹ of the company and its replacement²² with a more flexible, digitally mediated market for piecework, we must remember that companies have played a critical role in absorbing risks associated with market production that had previously²³ fallen on workers, with tragic²⁴ consequences.

当然，难就难在这里。维多利亚时代英国形成全国劳动力市场之后，带来的是一个世纪的爆炸式增长。但那也是一个狄更斯式(Dickensian)掠夺和混乱主导的世纪。在我们庆祝企业灭亡，被一个更加灵活的、数字化的计件工作市场所取代之前，我们必须记住，公司一直扮演一个关键角色，那就是吸收与市场生产有关的风险，这种风险此前一度由劳动者自己承担，造成了许多悲惨后果。

In 1914, Henry Ford²⁵ doubled the daily salary of employees and ushered²⁶ in a new conception of the relationship between business and workers. Following decades of conflicts between capital and labour, businesses would now absorb some of the risk of living in a market economy.

1914年，亨利•福特(Henry Ford)给员工涨了一倍日薪，开创了一种新型的企业与劳动者关系。在经历了几十年的劳资冲突后，现在很多企业会吸收部分在一个市场化经济中生存所面临的风险。

If, in the next century, electronic markets begin to supplant²⁷ companies as the organising force behind economic exchange, we will confront these dilemmas²⁸ anew. Some internet entrepreneurs seem to know as much. That is wise. The on-demand economy heralds²⁹ a form of economic co-operation that Ford could not have imagined. But its novelty should not blind us to a social challenge he was among the first to confront.

如果在下一个世纪，电子市场开始取代企业，成为组织经济交换的力量，那么我们将再次面对这些难题。一些互联网企业家对此似乎也心知肚明。这是明智的。按需经济预示着一种福特当年无法想象得到的经济合作形式的到来。但其新奇性不应该使我们忽视一道社会难题，而福特是直面这道难题的先驱者。

The writer is Berkman professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School

本文作者是哈佛大学法学院(Harvard Law School)伯克曼(Berkman)企业法律研究教授