La "questione dimensionale" come problema organizzativo

Alessandro Arrighetti and F. Traù ()

No 2007-EP04, Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy)

Abstract: The paper argues that the shape of the long-run size distribution of business firms is basically determined by the availability of organisational capabilities, and that its changes over time (the "direction" of change) depend on the way in which (exogenous) "environmental" conditions affect firms' decisions as to what extent the division of labour has to take place within their boundaries rather than being allocated through market transactions. In such perspective it is argued that the growth of firms brings about important changes in their internal shape, by involving the development of more and more "control" functions. In particular, in this connection Italian firms seem to be characterised, in the current phase of industrial development, by a tendency towards growing complexity, sub specie of the internalisation of a larger set of activities (other than production) with respect to the past.

Keywords: Firm Size Structure; Firm Growth and Organisation; Medium-Sized Firms; Division of Labour; Markets vs. Hierarchies; Organisational Change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D23 L11 L22 L23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swrwebeco.econ.unipr.it/RePEc/pdf/I_2007-04.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Status read failed: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:par:dipeco:2007-ep04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy) Via J.F. Kennedy 6, 43100 PARMA (Italy). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Lasagni ().