ABSTRACT
The chapters in this volume are part of an emergent discipline of organizational analysis which we believe now fully deserves the attention of organization theorists and practitioners. This emergent paradigm is in part an attempt to grapple with the complexities of a rapidly changing world and the need to look beyond the traditional sources of competitive advantage. The complexity of organizations indeed continues to keep theorists busy as they strive to tackle the perennial problem of how to design efficient and viable organizations and how best to respond to or anticipate new environmental challenges. These efforts have seen developments in a number of fields, from transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1979) to institutional theory (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) and the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991; Grant, 1991).
