Organizational Economics -- The Application of Economic Analysis Methods in Organizational Management (3rd Edition)

Author: Seter Duma (Netherlands), Henk Schrijver
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-16
Features: For students studying business administration, sociology, and organizational psychology, organizational management is an important discipline. Although both organization and management are important subjects, most standard textbooks lack significant coverage of economic analysis of organizational behavior. However, in recent years, articles on organizational and economic analysis have gained increasing attention in scientific journals. As a supplementary textbook, this book can be used alongside conventional textbooks on organizational management or strategic management. Additionally, it can also serve as an introductory textbook for organizational economics. For economics students, this book is also highly beneficial. This is because most microeconomics textbooks rarely cover the field of organizational management, and this book provides them with a new perspective—viewing a related yet often overlooked field from their own discipline. This book is a foundational textbook for organizational management. It should be said that there has been a great deal of research on corporate organizations from an economic perspective both domestically and internationally, accumulating substantial research literature. However, synthesizing this research, incorporating it into a specific framework, and writing a comprehensive and accessible textbook is no easy task. This book is an outstanding example. Corporate organizations have always been a key focus 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 organizational management, most of which draw on research from sociology, psychology, and political science to study corporate organizations from a management perspective. In recent years, research on corporate organizations from an economic perspective has gained increasing attention. In 1986, Barney and H. Scott proposed the concept of "organizational economics" in Organizational Economics: A New Paradigm for Understanding and Studying Organizations, to illustrate the contributions of economics to organizational theory. The contributions of economics to organizational theory mainly include three aspects: one is the agency theory of Jensen and Meckling; another is the transaction cost theory of Coase and Williamson; and the last is Porter's comparative advantage theory proposed in 1985. The research in this book is clearly not limited to these three fields. It also incorporates corporate behavior theory, industrial organization theory, game theory, and organizational evolution theory into the contributions and scope of economics to organizational theory, systematically addressing questions such as "What is an organization?", "Why do organizations exist?", and "What factors influence organizational operations?". It provides a well-defined and explained framework for the discipline of organizational economics, making a rigorous and valuable exploration of the application of economic methods in organizational management.