ABSTRACT
Within the last two decades, the question of the origin and nature of the factory system has leapt from obscurity to fill thousands of pages. The seminal article was, of course, Marglin’s ‘radical’ interpretation of factory organisation, a paper now twenty years old. But Marglin’s broadside arguably aroused as much interest as it did because the questions it addressed were quite congenial to those in which the larger profession was becoming increasingly interested, namely, questions of institutions and organisation. As exemplified in the work of Douglass North in economic history and Oliver Williamson in the economics of organisation, this New Institutional Economics, as it was coming to be called, offered a fresh viewpoint on the nature of capitalist organisation during the Industrial Revolution. Economic historians like David Landes and S.R.H.Jones also took up the cudgels, adding historical insight and a perspective typically rather different from that of either the ‘radicals’ or the New Institutionalists.
