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

The social structures of markets and the internal organisation of firms are best viewed as attempts to mitigate the effects of competition with other firms.

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.

The purpose of the large horizontal (same-product) mergers was to reduce the number of plants and, hence, control production enough to insure a reasonable rate of profit. Mergers would allow a newly created large firm to produce full-time in its most efficient plants, and thereby maintain prices, production, and profits.