Indigenous emerging economy (EE) firms are increasingly competing in global markets or against multinational corporations (MNCs) in their home markets. But their institutional context at the national and local levels often suffers from what has been termed “institutional weakness” which is...

Much of the literature on corporate performance focuses on institutional restructuring, and implicitly assumes that constitutional factors are determined exogenously. Existing theories of the firm—whether a “goal paradigm” or an “exchange paradigm”—provide useful insights; but we...

In a previous essay (Sison and Fontrodona <CitationRef CitationID="CR8">2012</CitationRef>), we defined the common good of the firm as collaborative work, insofar as it provides, first, an opportunity to develop knowledge, skills, virtues, and meaning (work as praxis), and second, inasmuch as it produces goods and services to satisfy...</citationref>

Since the second half of the past century, increasingly flexible organizational forms have been appearing among firms. However, while hierarchies are easily described, too few mathematical tools are available for flexible organizations. In this article, two measures are proposed in order to...

The paper deals with development of a general theory of the firm. It discusses the demand for such a theory, reviews existing approaches to its generalization, and offers a new variant of general theory of the firm based on the contract theory. The theory is based on minimization of...

The paper studies through the lens of the economic theory of the firm the development of two managerial disciplines: supply chain management and relationship marketing. The author demonstrates which ideas have been borrowed by these disciplines from the economic theory of the firm, and in what...

This article surveys some arguments brought forward in defense of the theory of perfect competition. While some critics propose that the theory of perfect competition, and thus also the theory of the firm, are logically flawed, (mainstream) economists defend their most popular textbook model by...

The world has embraced a set of concepts (knowledge driven growth) which are seen as the ‘core of future growth and wellbeing’ without any commonly agreed notion of what they are, how they might be measured, and crucially therefore, how they actually do (or might) affect economic growth and...

A debate around the book by Denis Segrestin ("Les chantiers du manager", Paris, Colin, 2004) gives an opportunity to hope for deeper and rigorous anaytical frameworks about organizational theories of firms. Two perspectives are suggested: firms as collective action systems open to their...