Neil Fligstein Quotes

Initial formation of policy domains and the rules they create affecting property rights, governance structures, and rules of exchange shape the development of new markets because they produce cultural templates that determine how to organize in a given society.

The notion that advertising was a sort of corporate luxury, to be indulged in where there are no demands left over, now seems archaic and quaint. Businessmen are increasingly inclined to view the appropriation as a true capital investment – as much so as a new plant.

State building can be viewed as the historical process by which groups outside of the state are able to get domains organized by the state to make rules for some set of societal fields. These rules reflect the interests of the most powerful groups in various fields. Politically oriented social movements are, by definition, outside of some established field of a given state. They are oriented toward either creating a new domain where they will have power, or taking over and transforming an existing domain or even the entire state. At any given moment, there are political projects in the fields that make up states (i.e., “normal politics”) and social movements oriented toward altering incumbents’ ability to set rules.

We know that most of the wealth and income of the country is owned by a few large corporations, that these corporations in turn are owned by an infinitesimally small number of people and that the profits from the operation of these corporations go to a very small group with the result that the new opportunities for new enterprise, whether corporate or individual, are constantly being restricted. The committee therefore recommends the vigorous and vigilant enforcement of the antitrust laws, confident that an awakening business conscience will realize the necessity of complete cooperation in the elimination of monopolistic practice.

Markets are social constructs that reflect the unique political-cultural construction of their business enterprises and nations.

By 1890, the corporate form had assume its modern guise. The managers and owners of corporations along with the actors in the courts, states, and federal government had helped develop sufficient law and precedence to protect the corporation from almost any attack.

The main problem actors face is uncertainty caused by difficulties in finding suppliers and customers and in controlling their own firm.

The organizational fields of the largest firms continued to be unstable. There were no accepted rules to define how firms could avoid destructive competition, so they attempted to control their markets through various aggressive trade tactics, continued mergers, cartels, getting the federal government to guarantee profitability.

[Institutional entrepreneurs must] size up the condition of the organizational field and figure out what kinds of action make sense.

In this book Neil Fligstein takes issue with prevailing theories of the corporation and proposes a radically new view that has important implications for American competitiveness.

Conceptions of control refer to understandings that structure perceptions of how a market works and that allow actors to interpret their world and act to control situations. A conception of control is simultaneously a worldview that allows actors to interpret the actions of others and a reflection of how the market is structured. Conceptions of control reflect market-specific agreements between actors in firms on principles of internal organization (i.e., forms of hierarchy), tactics for competition or cooperation, and the hierarchy or status ordering of firms in a given market. The state must ratify, help to create, or at the very least, not oppose a conception of control.

Organizational and not financial or ownership embeddedness is likely to be a more important cause of actions of firms than anything else in the case of United States. This means efforts should concentrate on specifying models of relations between firms that focus on intra- and interorganizational processes, such as the construction of strategic action and the cultural frames by which such a construction makes sense.

The forms of social organization produced the market, not the reverse... Instead of markets calling forth efficient forms of social organization, political and social interactions produced the structuring of sociologically effective markets.

The basic insight of the finance conception was that such a firm could be more tightly controlled by strict accounting. This progression does not imply, however, that one conception of control caused the emergence of its successor. New conceptions of control evolved out of key interactions among firms and between firms and the state.

All large organizations have an internal power struggle over the goals and resources of the organization.... In the largest firms, there are two bases of control : formal ownership and authority. Those who own the firm control by virtue of ownership. Authority relations embedded in the organizational structure legitimate how managers can control organizations.