The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective
Students of management are nearly unanimous (as are managers themselves) in believing
that the contemporary business corporation is in a period of dizzying change. This
book represents the first time that leading experts in sociology, law, economics,
and management studies have been assembled in one volume to explain the varying ways
in which contemporary businesses are transforming themselves to respond to globalization,
new technologies, workforce transformation, and legal change. Together their essays,
whose focal point is an emerging network form of organization, bring order to the
chaotic tumble of diagnoses, labels, and descriptions used to make sense of this
changing world.
Following an introduction by the editor, the first three chapters--by Walter Powell,
David Stark, and Eleanor Westney--report systematically on change in corporate structure,
strategy, and governance in the United States and Western Europe, East Asia, and
the former socialist world. They separate fact from fiction and established trend
from extravagant extrapolation. This is followed by commentary on them: Reinier Kraakman
affirms the durability of the corporate form; David Bryce and Jitendra Singh assess
organizational change from an evolutionary perspective; Robert Gibbons considers
the logic of relational contracting in firms; and Charles Tilly probes the deeper
historical context in which firms operate. The result is a revealing portrait of
the challenges that managers face at the dawn of the twenty-first century and of
how the diverse responses to those challenges are changing the nature of business
enterprise throughout the world.
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Chapter 1. Introduction: Making Sense of the Contemporary Firm and Prefiguring Its Future (by Paul DiMaggio)
Part 1. Portraits From Three Regions
Chapter 2. The Capitalist Firm in the Twenty-First Century: Emerging Patterns
in Western Enterprise (by Walter W. Powell)
Chapter 3. Ambiguous Assets for Uncerta in Environments: Heterarchy in Postsocialist
Firms (by David Stark)
Chapter 4. Japanese Enterprise Faces the Twenty-First Century (by D. Eleano
Westney)
Part 2. Commentaries
Chapter 5. The Durability of the Corporate Form (by Reinier Kraakman)
Chapter 6. The Future of the Firm from an Evolutionary Perspective (by David
J. Bryce and Jitendra V. Singh)
Chapter 7. Firms (and Other Relationships) (by Robert Gibbons)
Chapter 8. Welcome to the Seventeenth Century (by Charles Tilly)
Chapter 9. Conclusion. The Futures of Business Organization and Paradoxes of Change (by Paul DiMaggio)
References
Index
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