The Economics and Sociology of Second-Best Organizations

第二好的组织的经济学和社会学

• 批准号: 9809107
• 负责人: Robert Gibbons
• 金额: $ 15.59万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-08-15 至 2001-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9809107&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Economics; Sociology; Second; Best; Organizations

In 1940, Robert Merton launched a new approach to organization theory. Whereas Weber had focused on the role of formal structures (such as job descriptions, authority relationships, and career ladders) in designing efficient organizations, Merton challenged both the focus on formal structures and the conclusion of efficient performance. In the 1950s and '60s, Merton's students and their contemporaries undertook detailed, first-hand observations of organizations and wrote books describing and analyzing what they saw (see Blau (1955), Crozier (1963), Dalton (1959), Gouldner (1954), and Selznick (1949), for example). These books confirmed that many organizations do not exhibit the `precision, speed, expert control, continuity, discretion, and optimal returns on input` (Merton, 1940: 561) of Weber's ideal type, and that informal structures (such as quid pro quos, shared understandings, and relationships not shown on the organization chart) are at least as important as formal structures in many organizations. Furthermore, these books showed two roles for informal structures: in some cases, they subverted the organization's rational design; in others, they inspired superior organizational performance. In the 1970s, organizational sociology had begun to shift its focus from life inside organizations to the relationship between an organization and its environment. Today, this transformation is essentially complete: two of the strongest sub-fields are population ecology and institutional theory, both of which typically treat the firm as a black box, and even network theory focuses more often on networks between firms (again treated as black boxes) than on networks of people within firms. In economics, the last 25 years saw a different transformation, in which the theories of information, incentives, games, and contracts developed rapidly. I believe it is now time to revisit the sociological evidence on life inside organizations by developing models rooted in these new economic theories. (I also wonder whether one reason sociologists stopped working on these issues was that they ran out of new ways to make progress. Now we have one.) This suggestion may not seem new: in the last five years there have been many papers in the emerging area of organizational economics. But much of this theorizing seems to have taken place in an empirical vacuum. In particular, I fear that many organizational economists have been exposed to no organizations other than universities! In an attempt to avoid this fate myself, I have developed a deep relationship with one organization (Citibank). In this proposal I seek support for a second approach: I would like to read and model the accounts of other first-hand observers of organizations, including those from the organizational sociology literature of the '50s and '60s, as well as more recent accounts that straddle the business and academic literatures (such as Bower (1970), Eccles (1985), and Gerlach (1991)). My limited reading of accounts by first-hand observers suggests that this research strategy may be enormously fruitful. For example, the proposal describes an argument by Crozier (1964) that was reinvented by Milgrom and Roberts (1988). My point is neither that such subsequent formal modeling by economists has no value nor that informal arguments by non-economists have no value until they are formalized. Rather, my point is simply that anyone who anticipates the economics literature by two decades merits further attention. Because I have not yet read much, I cannot say much about the models I will develop. In this proposal, therefore, I give two examples of my prior work to suggest that the proposed research is both feasible and valuable. The first example is drawn from `Taking Coase Seriously,` an essay I wrote about (second-best) inefficient organizations at the request of the Administrative Science Quarterly (the leading journal in organization theory). The second example is drawn from Baker, Gibbons, and Murphy (1997), which combines Simon's (1951) conception of relational contracting with Grossman and Hart's (1986) definition of integration as asset ownership. The second example shows that formal and informal organizational structures not only co-exist but also interact, and hence that optimal organizational design involves choosing the formal design to facilitate useful informal interactions.

1940年，罗伯特·默顿（Robert Merton）提出了一种新的组织理论。韦伯关注的是正式结构（如职务描述、权力关系和职业阶梯）在设计高效组织中的作用，而默顿则质疑对正式结构的关注和高效绩效的结论。在20世纪50年代和60年代，默顿的学生和他们的同时代人对组织进行了详细的第一手观察，并撰写了书籍来描述和分析他们所看到的（例如，参见Blau（1955）、Crozier（1963）、道尔顿（1959）、Goullit（1954）和Selznick（1949））。这些著作证实，许多组织并没有表现出韦伯理想类型的“精确性、速度、专家控制、连续性、自由裁量权和投入的最佳回报”（Merton，1940：561），而且在许多组织中，非正式结构（如等价交换、共同理解和组织结构图上没有显示的关系）至少与正式结构一样重要。此外，这些书显示了非正式结构的两个作用：在某些情况下，它们颠覆了组织的理性设计;在其他情况下，它们激发了上级组织绩效。 在20世纪70年代，组织社会学开始将其重点从组织内部的生活转移到组织与环境之间的关系。今天，这种转变基本上已经完成：两个最强大的子领域是人口生态学和制度理论，这两个理论通常都将企业视为黑箱，甚至网络理论也更关注企业之间的网络（再次被视为黑箱），而不是企业内部的人的网络。 在经济学领域，过去25年经历了一场不同的变革，信息、激励、博弈和契约理论得到了迅速发展。我认为，现在是时候通过发展植根于这些新经济理论的模型，重新审视关于组织内部生活的社会学证据了。（我也想知道，社会学家停止研究这些问题的一个原因是不是他们已经没有新的方法来取得进展了。现在我们有一个）。 这个建议似乎并不新鲜：在过去的五年里，在组织经济学的新兴领域已经有许多论文。但这种理论化似乎大多发生在经验真空中。特别是，我担心许多组织经济学家除了大学之外没有接触过任何组织！为了避免这种命运，我与一个组织（花旗银行）建立了深厚的关系。在这个提议中，我寻求对第二种方法的支持：我想阅读和模拟其他第一手组织观察者的描述，包括50年代和60年代的组织社会学文献，以及最近的跨商业和学术文献的描述（如鲍尔（1970），埃克尔斯（1985）和盖拉赫（1991））。 我对第一手观察者的有限阅读表明，这种研究策略可能会产生巨大的成果。例如，该提议描述了克罗齐尔（1964）的一个论点，该论点被米尔格罗姆和罗伯茨（1988）重新发明。我的观点既不是说经济学家随后的正式建模没有价值，也不是说非经济学家的非正式论证在正式化之前没有价值。相反，我的观点很简单，任何人如果能在20年前预测到经济学文献，都值得进一步关注。 因为我还没有读过很多书，所以我不能对我将要开发的模型说太多。因此，在这个建议中，我给出了我以前工作的两个例子，以表明所提出的研究是可行的和有价值的。第一个例子来自《认真对待科斯》（Taking Coase Seriously），这是我应《行政科学季刊》（Administrative Science Quarterly）（组织理论领域的主要期刊）的要求撰写的一篇关于（次佳的）低效组织的文章。第二个例子来自贝克、吉本斯和墨菲（Baker，Gibbons，and Murphy，1997），他们结合了西蒙（Simon，1951）的关系契约概念和格罗斯曼（Grossman）以及哈特（Hart，1986）对整合的定义，即资产所有权。第二个例子表明，正式和非正式的组织结构不仅共存，而且相互作用，因此，最佳的组织设计涉及选择正式的设计，以促进有用的非正式互动。