Private, Public, or Cooperative? Organizational Form and Economic Diversity in the U.S. Electrical Utility Industry, 1900-1950

私人、公共还是合作？

• 批准号: 0318466
• 负责人: Marc Schneiberg
• 金额: $ 8.56万
• 依托单位: Reed College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-07-01 至 2006-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0318466&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Private; Public; Cooperative; Organizational; Form

ABSTRACTWhen do consumers and local governments pursue cooperative or publicly owned alternatives to for-profit corporations? What conditions foster such alternatives to dominant forms of economic organization? Since the 1900s, Americans have depended heavily on private, investor owned utility corporations for generating, transmitting, and distributing electricity. During this time private utilities helped build a technologically sophisticated, national electricity system. At the same time, however, many private utility corporations regularly failed to act in consumers' or the public interest by working aggressively to eliminate competition, corrupting public officials, and routinely charging high rates, while leaving whole classes of communities under- or unserved. In response, consumer groups, reformers, and local public officials pursued new forms of power provision, organizing over 2500 local, publicly owned municipal utilities between 1900 and 1930 and nearly 1000 electrical cooperatives during the late 1930 and early 1940s. This study is an historical and quantitative analysis of when and how Americans consumers pursued alternatives to private corporations and regulated monopoly in the critical electric power infrastructure sector. I draw hypotheses from sociological, historical, and rational-choice institutionalism to examine how the economics of organization induced actors to turn to public and cooperative enterprise, and how politics, existing organizational ecologies, and institutional embeddedness enabled actors to pursue those forms. A key question here is whether public and cooperative solutions to utility market problems were built on the organizational legacies of struggles to establish alternatives to corporations in other periods and sectors. The proposed research will contribute to organizational analysis by shedding new light on the capacity of institutional systems to support organizational diversity and the production of new organizational forms, and it will revise current views of the organizational history of American capitalism, documenting how the U.S. economy crystallized around not one, but at least two logics or industrial orders during the critical late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study also will help to foster a challenging and research based educational environment at Reed College by providing undergraduate student assistants involved in the project with extended, hands-on research training and a range of new research skills, while producing data sets and techniques that can be used for course and research based program development. Equally important, this study will provide information on policy options currently being debated in the utility industry, notably the use of public ownership and cooperatives to solve regulatory failures in electrical utility markets.

什么时候消费者和地方政府追求合作或公有的选择而不是以营利为目的的公司？是什么条件催生了这种替代主流经济组织形式的选择？自20世纪以来，美国人严重依赖私人投资者拥有的公用事业公司来发电、输电和配电。在此期间，私人公用事业公司帮助建立了一个技术先进的国家电力系统。然而，与此同时，许多私人公用事业公司经常未能为消费者或公众利益行事，他们积极消除竞争，腐败政府官员，经常收取高额费用，而使整个社区的各个阶层得不到服务或得不到服务。作为回应，消费者团体、改革者和地方政府官员寻求新的电力供应形式，在1900年至1930年期间组织了2500多个地方公有市政公用事业，在1930年代末和1940年代初组织了近1000个电力合作社。这项研究是对美国消费者何时以及如何在关键的电力基础设施领域寻求私营公司的替代品和监管垄断的历史和定量分析。我从社会学、历史学和理性选择制度主义中提取假设，来研究组织经济学是如何促使参与者转向公共和合作企业的，以及政治、现有的组织生态和制度嵌入性是如何使参与者追求这些形式的。这里的一个关键问题是，公用事业市场问题的公共和合作解决方案是否建立在其他时期和部门为建立公司替代品而进行的斗争的组织遗产上。拟议的研究将有助于组织分析，揭示制度系统支持组织多样性和新组织形式产生的能力，并将修订当前对美国资本主义组织历史的看法，记录美国经济在关键的19世纪末和20世纪初如何围绕不止一种，而是至少两种逻辑或工业秩序结晶。这项研究还将通过为参与该项目的本科生助理提供扩展的、实践的研究培训和一系列新的研究技能，同时产生可用于课程和基于研究的项目开发的数据集和技术，从而有助于在里德学院培养一个具有挑战性和研究型的教育环境。同样重要的是，本研究将提供有关公用事业行业目前正在讨论的政策选择的信息，特别是利用公有制和合作社来解决电力公用事业市场的监管失灵。