 Firms as Social ActorsRichard Adelstein ()
No 2013-003, Wesleyan Economics Working Papers from Wesleyan University, Department of Economics Abstract: This essay asks what firms are, whether they are ‘real’ social actors, and whether their actions can be traced without remainder to the actions of living people or whether there is some irreducible aspect of their existence or operation that must be attributed to the organization itself. It describes firms as ongoing, multilateral relational contracts from whose operation, that is, from performance over time by specific individuals in the roles and relationships defined by the contract, emerge the firm’s idiosyncratic routines and capabilities. It emphasizes the role of entrepreneurs in the creation of firms and the close dependence of organizational capabilities on human performance, and argues that this account is consistent with a reasonable individualism that allows for social outcomes to be determined by the actions and interaction of individuals. It then proposes that firms are nonetheless institutional facts and thus ontologically subjective but epistemically objective components of reality, and concludes with directions for future work. Keywords: theories of the firm; relational contracts; organizational capabilities; collective actors; individualism; institutional facts (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published Journal of Institutional Economics 6 (2010): 329-349. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wes:weswpa:2010-003 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Wesleyan Economics Working Papers from Wesleyan University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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