ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed a significant renewal in interest for organization analysis among economists. For a long time, this field was left to management scholars and sociologists, with economists apparently satisfied with the concept of organizations as black boxes remaining beyond their scope. It has not always been so. In Industry and Trade (1919), a book that initiated the field of ‘industrial organization’, which developed considerably later on, A. Marshall considered that understanding ‘business organizations’ was a major issue. However, under the increasing influence of general equilibrium theories, with the attention of microeconomists focused on how markets are structured and on the impact of these structures, Marshall’s message weakened and the task of understanding the characteristics of organizations slipped away from economics.
