This book examines transaction cost economics, the influential theoretical perspective on organizations and industry that was the subject of Oliver Williamson's seminal book, Markets and Hierarchies (1975). Written by leading economists, sociologists, and political scientists, the essays collected here reflect the fruitful intellectual exchange that is occurring across the major social science disciplines. They examine transaction cost economics' general conceptual orientation, its specific theoretical propositions, its applications to policy, and its use in systematic empirical research. The chapters include classic texts, broad review essays, reflective commentaries, and several new contributions to a wide range of topics, including organizations, regulations and law, institutions, strategic management, game theory, entrepreneurship, innovation, finance, and technical information.

Making strategy requires undertaking major—often irreversible—decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts. Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist. This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.

Building theories of organizations is challenging: theories are partial and "folk" categories are fuzzy. The commonly used tools--first-order logic and its foundational set theory--are ill-suited for handling these complications. Here, three leading authorities rethink organization theory. "Logics of Organization Theory" sets forth and applies a new language for theory building based on a nonmonotonic logic and fuzzy set theory. In doing so, not only does it mark a major advance in organizational theory, but it also draws lessons for theory building elsewhere in the social sciences.

Organizational research typically analyzes organizations in categories such as "bank," "hospital," or "university." These categories have been treated as crisp analytical constructs designed by researchers. But sociologists increasingly view categories as constructed by audiences. This book builds on cognitive psychology and anthropology to develop an audience-based theory of organizational categories. It applies this framework and the new language of theory building to organizational ecology. It reconstructs and integrates four central theory fragments, and in so doing reveals unexpected connections and new insights.

Most analysts of corporations and industries adopt the focal perspective of a single prototypical organization. Many analysts also study corporations primarily in terms of their internal organizational structures or as complex systems of financial contracts. Glenn Carroll and Michael Hannan bring fresh insight to our understanding of corporations and the industries they comprise by looking beyond prototypical structures to focus on the range and diversity of organizations in their social and economic setting. The result is a rich rendering of analysis that portrays whole populations and communities of corporations.

"The Demography of Corporations and Industries" is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality. They review and synthesize the major theoretical mechanisms of corporate demography, ranging from aging and size dependence to population segregation and density dependence. The book also explores some selected implications of corporate demography for public policy, including employment and regulation.

In this path-breaking book, Carroll and Hannan demonstrate why demographic research on corporations is important; describe how to conduct demographic research; specify fruitful areas of future research; and suggest how the demographic perspective can enrich the public discussion of issues surrounding the corporation in our constantly evolving industrial society. All researchers and analysts with an interest in this topic will find The Demography of Corporations and Industries an invaluable resource.

Why does the number of organizations of any given kind vary over time? Utilizing a diverse group of organizations including national labor unions, newspapers and newspaper publishers, brewing firms, life insurance companies, and banks, this book seeks to deepen and broaden the understanding of change in organizational populations by examining the dynamics of numbers of organizations in populations. Such an approach involves explaining the sources of growth and decline in the sum of organizations (what the authors call "density") over the histories of populations of organizations. The authors conclude their study by formulating a theory of density-dependent legitimation and competition.

"How can fraternities maintain unique identities when a quarter of their membership turns over every year? How do successful firms retain their distinctive capabilities despite continual changes in personnel? To date, organizational scholars have had few compelling answers to such questions, despite their central importance to the study of organizational behavior and performance. Harrison and Carroll present a refreshing and stimulating approach that carefully unpacks the complex interactions driving cultural persistence and change. Through the development of a unique demographic perspective on cultural processes, "Culture and Demography in Organizations" defines a bold new research agenda for organizational theorists."--Jesper Sorensen, MIT Sloan School of Management

"In this exemplary book, Harrison and Carroll ask a basic question: How do organizations manage to persist, sometimes for centuries, despite the flow of people in and out? The outcome is a formal theory of cultural persistence with some surprising implications."--Nigel Gilbert, Professor of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK

"Harrison and Carroll offer a refreshingly balanced view of research on organizational culture and the role of demography in creating, maintaining, and disrupting it. Organizational scholars will find the book engaging, accessible, and insightful. My overall recommendation is enthusiastic and unambiguous: this is clearly a book worth reading."--Jennifer A. Chatman, University of California, Berkeley

"This book . . . provides a thorough account of computer simulation in the context of a sustained research program . . . Not only is the book grounded in extremely sound research, it is also setforth in a sober and clear fashion that allows readers to see the limits as well as the strengths of the authors' model."--David Strang, Cornell University

"Harrison and Carroll have written a careful, tightly reasoned theoretical book, approaching organizational culture--a subject of widespread interest--from an novel angle. Their computer simulation methodology is apt, enabling them to realistically model the outcome of multiple intersecting processes that affect the extent to which members are aligned with the cultural ideal in an organization: hiring decisions, management and peer socialization, and departures."--Peter V. Marsden, Harvard University