Cognitive economies and the ‘nature of the district’

In ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Coase quotes D.H. Robertson who notes that it is possible to find ‘islands of conscious power in this ocean of unconscious co-operation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk’ (Coase 1937: 386). Coase asks why is it so. As we know, he contends that the balance between the costs of producing in-house and the costs of using the market explains the existence of firms ‘coagulating transactions’ within the market.