Firms as social actors
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5843173 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Adelstein (Wesleyan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 329-349 |
| Publication date | 2010-05-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Institutional Economics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-1374 • E-ISSN: 1744-1382 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1744137410000044 |
| OpenAlex | W2147005522 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 35 |
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
Economic Theory and Institutions · Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences · Management and Organizational Studies
Legal foundations of capitalism
Firms, Markets and Economic Change
The Use of Knowledge in Society
What is an institution?
The vanishing hand
Theory of the firm
An evolutionary theory of economic change
The Visible Hand
On the Construction of a Social Reality
Essays on Actions and Events
Political theories of the middle age
Emergence and reduction in chemistry
The Nature of Corporations
The Nature of the Firm
The Organisation of Industry
The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
Supervenience and mind
Meanings of methodological individualism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2012 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |