This paper develops a coordination perspective on the firm. The basic idea is to combine insights into the division of labor with insights into the allocation of property rights. Thus, a basic argument is that use rights over productive assets are necessary in order to accumulate the experience needed to perform improvements in production. An increase in the division of labor in production accelerates the accumulation of skills from learning by doing in production. However, an increasing division of labor introduces greater complexity and new kinds of tools and equipment, and this in turn can create uncertainty about the best way of coordinating the specialized and interdependent tasks. The result may be bottlenecks in production and uneven development of components. Experimenting with the coordination of tasks is necessary in order to eliminate these problems. However, such experimentation is best facilitated by a certain structure of property rights. Coordination by direction provides a cheap way of conducting the experiments needed to collect information on how best to coordinate interdependent activities. Copyright 2001 by Oxford University Press.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Volume (Year): 10 (2001) Issue (Month): 1 (March) Pages: 151-78 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:10:y:2001:i:1:p:151-78
Contact details of provider: Postal: Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK Fax: 01865 267 985 Email: Web page: http://icc.oupjournals.org/
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)