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Information and Organization A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm

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This book is available in Oxford Scholarship Online - view abstracts and keywords at book and chapter level.

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Microeconomics

Organizational Theory & Behaviour

Business - General

Information and Organization

A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm

Mark Casson

328 pages | figures and tables | 234x156mm

978-0-19-829780-2 | Paperback | 11 January 2001

Price: £48.00

This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.

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An innovative vision of the economy in terms of the flow of information
A clear, lucid, and wide-ranging exposition of the approach that Casson has refined over the last two decades

This book offers a vision of the economy as a system of structured information flow. The structuring is effected by institutions, and in particular by firms, which specialize in processing the information needed to allocate resources properly. Firms are the institutional embodiment of the visions of individual entrepreneurs who believe that they have found a better way of allocating resources.

Entrepreneurial vision is only a partial vision, however, in the sense that it does not encompass the entire economy, but only a subset of it. Free market economies encourage the exploitation of such partial visions because they encourage intermediation—-it is by mediating between potential buyers and potential sellers that entrepreneurial visions are realized. A legal framework of private property, coupled with a moral framework to control the incidence of cheating, allows very sophisticated structures of information processing to emerge. These structures effect an elaborate division of labour in the dimensions of information and control. Each firm is a small component of the overall structure of information flow. This structure is highly flexible and evolves continuously as circumstances change. Efficient adaptation is encouraged by rewarding entrepreneurs who create new firms to be slotted into the existing structure.

This vision has evolved over the last fifteen years, during which the author has researched a variety of topics connected with the theory of the firm——entrepreneurship, business culture, multinational enterprise, joint ventures and the like. In each of these areas he has identified the ways in which the orthodox theory of the firm needs to be modified in order to make it work properly. This book represents a major intellectual synthesis of that work.

Readership: Academics and graduate students in management studies (especially organizational behaviour and marketing), business and economic history, and industrial economics.

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

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Information and Organization

A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm

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