ABSTRACT
Governments are important to organization, establishing and enforcing the rules under which organizations operate. They can make a course of action profitable or illegal. Governments may be stable guarantors of open and fair dealing, or they may be bumbling inept entities unable to control even their own officials. Governments facilitate the establishment and enforcement of the fundamental understandings necessary to action: who is entitled to what uses (use rights); who may legitimately sell products, land, and equipment (ownership rights); and what actions are acceptable (contract law). They are extraordinarily various, ranging from centuries-old tradition-encrusted institutions to the bandit in control of a small region, with every imaginable variation in between. Yet however various they are in form and practice, governments are always important to organizations and their participants. They establish the rules by which organizations must play and have the means to use physical force to coerce compliance.
