The Celler-Kefauver Amendment to Section 7 of the Clayton Act has now been made effective by judicial ratification. The Supreme Court has said that t… - Neil Fligstein

The key argument is that managers and owners in firms search for stable patterns of interaction with their largest competitors. Once stable patterns prove to be both legal and profitable, firms set up organizational fields that tend to produce and reproduce those patterns.

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.

They are the basic mechanism of control of the external environment available to managers and entrepreneurs. Organizational fields are not generally benign and cooperative arrangements held in place by a sense of duty or honor the rhetoric and ideology of their proponents might lead one to think so. Instead, they are set up to benefit their most powerful members.