This essay draws upon the contractarian distinction between constitutional and operational levels of personal choice and an evolutionary analysis of the growth of firms to illuminate the complex of theoretical and historical issues surrounding the emergence of large-scale economic organization...

This essay examines the alternatives of spontaneous order and central planning in the context of human language to cast new light both on the issues raised in the Socialist Calculation debate of the 1930s and 40s and on the nature of language itself. The evolution of the complex systems of rules...

This essay asks whether business firms should be treated as moral or legal persons, capable of bearing rights and duties as distinct entities. Building on earlier work describing firms as relational contracts in performance (Adelstein 2010), it considers the nature of legal and moral...

This essay asks what firms are, whether they are ‘real’ social actors, and whether their actions can be traced without remainder to the actions of living people or whether there is some irreducible aspect of their existence or operation that must be attributed to the organization itself. It...