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Journal ArticleDOI

Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans.

William G. Ouchi
- 01 Mar 1980 - 
- Vol. 25, Iss: 1, pp 129
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TLDR
The transactions cost approach provides such a framework because it allows us to identify the conditions which give rise to the costs of mediating exchanges between individuals: goal incongruence and performance ambiguity.
Abstract
Evaluating organizations according to an efficiency criterion would make it possible to predict the form organizations will take under certain conditions. Organization theory has not developed such a criterion because it has lacked a conceptual scheme capable of describing organizational efficiency in sufficiently microsopic terms. The transactions cost approach provides such a framework because it allows us to identify the conditions which give rise to the costs of mediating exchanges between individuals: goal incongruence and performance ambiguity. Different combinations of these causes distinguish three basic mechanisms of mediation or control: markets, which are efficient when performance ambiguity is low and goal incongruence is high; bureaucracies, which are efficient when both goal incongruence and performance ambiguity are moderately high; and clans, which are efficient when goal incongruence is low and performance ambiguity is high.

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The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
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Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept

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The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach

TL;DR: The transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization regards the transaction as the basic unit of analysis and holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the analysis of organizations as mentioned in this paper.
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Social Capital and Value Creation: The Role of Intrafirm Networks

TL;DR: In this article, the relationships among the structural, relational, and cogni cation of a large multinational electronics company were examined using data collected from multiple respondents in all the business units of the company.
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Competition for competence and interpartner learning within international strategic alliances

TL;DR: In this paper, a detailed analysis of nine international alliances yielded a fine-grained understanding of the determinants of interpartner learning, concluding that not all partners are equally adept at learning, that asymmetries in learning alter the relative bargaining power of partners, stability and longevity may be inappropriate metrics of partnership success, and partners may have competitive, as well as collaborative aims, vis-a-vis each other.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony

TL;DR: Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules as discussed by the authors, and the elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and i...
Journal ArticleDOI

The Nature of the Firm

Ronald H. Coase
- 01 Nov 1937 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that a definition of a firm may be obtained which is not only realistic in that it corresponds to what is meant by a firm in the real world, but is tractable by two of the most powerful instruments of economic analysis developed by Marshall, the idea of the margin and that of substitution.