ABSTRACT
Over the course of two and a half centuries, the evolution of the economy has had three distinctive stages in the sociology of economic organizations. In the first stage, the major dialectic was between economic firms and public sector bureaucracies where the motivation was either the taking of risk or preferring a stable career. Both products and services were relatively simple, and coordination of work could be achieved with plans and a strict hierarchy of authority. In the second stage, increasingly some sectors of the economy and public services had to differentiate new forms in which research was important. In these, coordination of work became more problematic especially in the relationship between production and research. Values as a form of motivation become critical and the discipline of management emerges. Finally, in the third stage, more organizational forms have emerged, and work coordination has become complex evolving toward various kinds of group methods. In general, the evolutionary trend has been toward the proliferation of organizational forms with the special rise of NGOs and inter-organizational networks. Value motivations of serving the public interest have become more important. Promising areas of future research are also discussed.
