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Students of management are nearly unanimous
(as are managers themselves) in believing that the contemporary
business corporation is in a period of dizzying change.
This book represents the first time that leading experts
in sociology, law, economics, and management studies have
been assembled in one volume to explain the varying ways
in which contemporary businesses are transforming themselves
to respond to globalization, new technologies, workforce
transformation, and legal change. Together their essays,
whose focal point is an emerging network form of organization,
bring order to the chaotic tumble of diagnoses, labels,
and descriptions used to make sense of this changing world.
Following an introduction by the editor,
the first three chapters -- by Walter Powell, David Stark,
and Eleanor Westney -- report systematically on change in
corporate structure, strategy, and governance in the United
States and Western Europe, East Asia, and the former socialist
world. They separate fact from fiction and established trend
from extravagant extrapolation. This is followed by commentary
on them: Reiner Kraakman affirms the durability of the corporate
form; David Bryce and Jitendra Singh assess organizational
change from an evolutionary perspective; Robert Gibbons
considers the logic of relational contracting in firms;
and Charles Tilly probes the deeper historical context in
which firms operate. The result is a revealing portrait
of the challenges that managers face at the dawn of the
twenty-first century and of how the diverse responses to
those challenges are changing the nature of business enterprise
throughout the world.
Paul DiMaggio is Professor of Sociology
at Princeton University. He has written widely in the fields
of organization theory, economic sociology, and sociology
of culture, and is coeditor, with Walter Powell, of The
New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis.
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