Handbook of Economic Organization

3 July 2012 at 4:42 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Kudos to Anna Grandori for her edited volume, Handbook of Economic Organization: Integrating Economic and Organization Theory, currently making its way through the editorial process at Edward Elgar. Blurb:

The volume distinctively aims at integrating economic and organization theories for the explanation and design of economic organization. Economic organization is therefore intended both as an object of enquiry and as an emerging disciplinary field: not economics applied to organization as an object, but a forefront interdisciplinary field attracting researches and integrating insights from economics, organization theory, strategy and management, economic sociology, and cognitive psychology. The authors are distinguished scholars at their productive peak in those fields, sharing an in interest in an integrated and enlarged approach to economic organization. Each chapter not only addresses foundational issues and provides a state-of-art, but also offers original contributions and identifies key issues for future research.

Table of Contents is below the fold. You”ll find many of your favorite authors.

Introduction
Economic organization as an object of study and as an emerging disciplinary field (Anna Grandori)

Part I. The micro – foundations of economic organization : extending behavioral assumptions on knowledge, interest and rationality

1. Models of rationality in economic organization: ‘economic’, ‘experiential’, ‘epistemic’ (Anna Grandori)
2. Motivation governance (Margit Osterloh and Bruno Frey)
3. Cognition and governance: why incentives have to take the back seat (Siegwart Lindenberg)
4. Knowledge governance: meaning, origins, and implications (Nicolai Foss)

Part II. The constitution of economic organization between interacting and contracting

5. Contracts: coordination across firm boundaries (Victor Goldberg)
6. The Enterprise as Community: Firms, Towns, and Universities
(Scott Masten)
7. Ethics, economic organization and the social contract (Lorenzo Sacconi)
8. Language and economic organization (Massimo Warglien)

Part III . The shaping of economic organization between design and evolution

9. Organizational adaptation and evolution: Darwinism versus Lamarkism? (Geoffrey Hodgson)
10. Exaptation and innovation processes (Giovanni Bonifati, Marco Villani)
11. Interdependence and Organization Design (Phanish Puranam, Merlo Raveendran)
12. Dynamics of organizational structure (Nick Argyres, Todd Zenger)
13. Design rules for dynamic organization design : the contribution of computational modeling (Richard Burton, Borge Obel)
14. The formation and change of organization: lesson from economic laboratory experiments (Peter Kriss, Roberto Weber)

Part IV. Human resources and economic organization between assets and actors

15. Human capital and property rights (Anna Grandori)
16. The economic organization of employment (Bruce Kaufman)
17. Organization of work practices and performance ( Riccardo Leoni)

Part V. Technical assets and economic organization between determinants and opportunities

18. Technical assets and property rights (Ugo Pagano)
19. Open innovation and firm boundaries: Task decomposition, knowledge distribution and the locus of innovation (and Karim Lakhani, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Michael Tushman)
20. Modularity and economic organization: concepts, theory, observations, and predictions ( Ron Sanchez, Joe Mahoney)
21. The organizational design of high-tech start-ups (Massimo Colombo, Cristina Rossi Lamastra)

Part VI . Forms of economic organization between discrete alternatives and combinative configurations

22. Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial governance and economic organization
(Nicolai Foss, Peter Klein)
23. Corporate personhood (Margaret Blair)
24. Worker cooperatives and democratic governance (John Pencavel)
25. Internal and external hybrids and the nature of Joint Ventures (Jean Françoise Hennart)
26. Inter-firm cooperatives (George Hendrikse, Li Feng)
27. The governance of franchising networks (Josef Windsperger)
28. Sub-contracting relationships (Ruth Rama and Adelheid Holl)
29. Public economic organization ( Jan-Erik Lane )

Conclusions
Integrating economic and organization theory: products, problems and prospects (Anna Grandori)