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The Firm as Association Versus the Firm as Commodity

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  • Putterman, Louis

Abstract

Recent years have seen the flowering of a new literature on the economic nature of firms marked by a concern with their internal organization and contractual characteristics. Related literatures on the principal-agent problem and the theory of financial markets have also contributed to a better understanding of firms as economic institutions. However, the place of the concept of the ownership of the firm is poorly developed in most of this literature, with many writers either ignoring the concept entirely or arguing that it is of no importance. The purpose of the present article is to point out that the concept of ownership of firms is crucial to an understanding of internal governance issues. Most economists implicitly presume that firms must be ownable and saleable if they are to be operated efficiently, and recently this viewpoint has been made more explicit by writers such as Jensen and Fama and Williamson. Their point of view is to some degree at odds with views of the firm as a coalition, which frequently appear in the same literature, and even more fundamentally in conflict with conceptions of the firm as an association or polity within which greater or lesser degrees of democracy in governance may be pursued. The first purpose of this article is to show that the incompletely articulated position of the leading authors on the economics of organization is that the firm is a commodity and must be so for purposes of efficiency.

Suggested Citation

  • Putterman, Louis, 1988. "The Firm as Association Versus the Firm as Commodity," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 4(2), pages 243-266, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:4:y:1988:i:02:p:243-266_00
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    Cited by:

    1. Silvia Sacchetti & Ermanno C. Tortia, 2013. "The Internal and External Governance of Cooperatives: Membership and Consistency of Values," Euricse Working Papers 1362, Euricse (European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises).
    2. Donald A R George & Eddi Fontanari & Ermanno Celeste Tortia, 2019. "Finance, property rights and productivity in Italian cooperatives," Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series 293, Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh.
    3. Sacchetti, Silvia & Tortia, Ermanno, 2012. "The internal and external governance of cooperatives: the effective membership and consistency of value," AICCON Working Papers 111-2012, Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit.
    4. Geoffrey Hodgson, 2002. "The Legal Nature of the Firm and the Myth of the Firm-Market Hybrid," International Journal of the Economics of Business, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(1), pages 37-60.
    5. Silvia Sacchetti & Ermanno C. Tortia, 2010. "A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR THE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF COOPERATIVE FIRMS: Self-defined rules, common resources, motivations, and incentives," Econometica Working Papers wp21, Econometica.
    6. Tarik AKIN & Abbas MIRAKHOR, 2016. "Efficiency with Rule-Compliance: A Contribution to the Theory of the Firm in Islamic Economics," Journal of Economics and Political Economy, KSP Journals, vol. 3(3), pages 560-574, September.
    7. Tortia, Ermanno Celeste, 2019. "Employment protection regimes in worker co-operatives: dismissal of worker members and distributive fairness," MPRA Paper 94536, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Tortia, Ermanno, 2005. "The accumulation of Capital in Labour-Managed Firms: Divisible Reserves and Bonds," AICCON Working Papers 23-2005, Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit.
    9. Carlo Borzaga & Chiara Carini & Ermanno Celeste Tortia, 2022. "Co‐operative enterprise anti‐cyclicality and the economic crisis: A comparative analysis of employment dynamics in Italy," Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 93(3), pages 551-577, September.

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