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

消费者和地方政府什么时候寻求合作或公有制的替代品，以营利性公司？ 是什么条件促成了这种对主导经济组织形式的替代？ 自20世纪以来，美国人一直严重依赖私人投资者拥有的公用事业公司来发电，传输和分配电力。 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，许多私营公用事业公司经常未能采取符合消费者或公共利益的行动，积极消除竞争，贿赂政府官员，并经常收取高费率，而使整个社区的服务水平低下或得不到服务。 作为回应，消费者团体、改革者和地方政府官员寻求新的供电形式，在1900年至1930年间组织了2500多家当地公有市政公用事业公司，并在1930年代末和1940年代初组织了近1000家电力合作社。 本文对美国消费者何时以及如何寻求私营企业的替代品和关键电力基础设施领域的垄断进行了历史和定量分析。 我从社会学、历史学和理性选择制度主义中得出假设，以研究组织经济学如何诱导参与者转向公共和合作企业，以及政治、现有组织生态和制度嵌入如何使参与者能够追求这些形式。 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建立公司替代品的斗争的组织遗产之上。拟议中的研究将有助于组织分析，揭示制度体系支持组织多样性和新组织形式产生的能力，并将修订目前对美国资本主义组织历史的看法，记录美国经济如何围绕一个，但至少有两个逻辑或工业秩序在关键的十九世纪末和二十世纪初。 这项研究也将有助于促进在里德学院具有挑战性和研究为基础的教育环境，通过提供参与该项目的本科生助理扩展，动手研究培训和一系列新的研究技能，同时产生数据集和技术，可用于课程和研究为基础的程序开发。 同样重要的是，本研究报告将提供资料，说明公用事业行业目前正在辩论的政策选择，特别是利用公有制和合作社解决电力公用事业市场监管失灵的问题。

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.