Organizational Economics

Author: Seter S. Dumaine Slaight (Netherlands) Yuan Lei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: This book is a fundamental textbook for the field of organizational management. It can be said that there have been numerous studies on corporate organization from an economic perspective both domestically and internationally, accumulating a substantial body of research literature. However, synthesizing these studies into a specific framework and writing a comprehensive and accessible textbook is not an easy task. This book serves as an excellent example of such an endeavor. Corporate organization has always been a significant subject of research in management studies, and the development of organizational theory has gone through three stages: classical organizational theory, neoclassical organizational theory, and modern organizational theory. To date, there are countless books on corporate organization management, most of which draw on research findings from fields such as sociology, psychology, and political science to study corporate organization from a management perspective. In recent years, research on corporate organization from an economic perspective has gained increasing attention. In 1986, Barney and H. Chandler explicitly proposed the concept of "organizational economics" in their book "Organizational Economics: A New Paradigm for Understanding and Studying Organizations," using it to illustrate the contributions of economics to organizational theory. The contributions of economics to organizational theory primarily include three aspects: one is the agency theory of Jensen and Meckling; another is the transaction cost theory of Coase and Williamson; and the third is Porter's comparative advantage theory proposed in 1985. The research in this book clearly does not limit itself to these three fields but also incorporates theories such as corporate behavior theory, industrial organization theory, game theory, and organizational evolution theory into the contributions and scope of economics to organizational theory. It systematically addresses questions such as "What is an organization?" "Why do organizations exist?" and "What factors influence organizational operations?" It provides a precise definition and explanation of the discipline of organizational economics and makes a diligent and valuable exploration of the application of economic methods in organizational management.