IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-00374969.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Power, Ownership and Entity: Some Issues on the Nature of the (Network)Firm

Author

Listed:
  • Virgile Chassagnon

    (LEFI - Laboratoire d'Economie de la Firme et des Institutions - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2)

Abstract

The firm was evicted from economic analysis for a long time. It appeared as a particular and substantial"scope" thanks to the economist R.H. Coase at the end of the 1930'S but sunk into oblivion for threedecades. This paper deals with the 1970's renewal of interest in the theory of the firm, particularly fromthe development of new institutional economics. But we argue that these contractual approaches need tobe refined by considering – as Rajan and Zingales argue – the impacts of "financial revolution" and of thevaluation of human capital on firm performance. Some alternative theories – based on critical resourcesor competences – become more and more evident to analyze the nature and the boundaries of the firm.This one conceals – beyond the metaphor of the "nexus of contracts" – the features of a real"organizational entity". In this article, we want to shed light on the crossed-fertilization effects betweenthese theories in order to raise the issue of the boundaries of the firm and to dissociate the legal andeconomic nature of the firm. It is hence suitable to deal with the theoretical analysis of the network-firm.The characterization of this complex organizational form, which is coordinated by a "hub-firm" that has apower over other legally independent firms without recourse to equity ownership, allows us to reveal boththe nature of interfirm cooperation and its implications on the theory of the firm. Finally, we propose aconception of the firm based on power.

Suggested Citation

  • Virgile Chassagnon, 2006. "Power, Ownership and Entity: Some Issues on the Nature of the (Network)Firm," Post-Print halshs-00374969, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00374969
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below 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.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00374969. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.