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born 1951 United States
Neil Fligstein (born May 23, 1951) is an American sociologist, and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work in the field between economic sociology, political sociology and organizational theory, and wrote his most notable works on corporate control, the "architecture of markets," and "markets as politics."
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The main problem actors face is uncertainty caused by difficulties in finding suppliers and customers and in controlling their own firm.
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.
Younger and smaller firms would be more likely to adopt the MDF (Multidivisional Form) than older and larger ones.
Markets are social constructs that reflect the unique political-cultural construction of their business enterprises and nations.
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.
their actors choose a course of action depending on what their competitors do.
[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.
The experiences of the war changed both Baruch’s and Wilson’s attitude toward the large firm. Following the war their anti-firm rhetoric was replaced with praise for the large firm’s patriotism and contribution to progress.
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 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 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.
The basis of social skill is the ability to relate to the situation of the ‘other.’ This means that whereas a given strategic actor has interests, he or she must take other people’s interests into account… to imaginatively identify with the states of others.
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 power struggle within the firm determines which conception of control will dominate and how that conception will be translated into concrete strategies. The winners of this struggle will push the organization into a certain direction and maintain that direction as long as their strategies bring positive results.
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.
Once in place as control perspectives, they are widely shared ways of reducing complexity of the world. They come into the existence in a piecemeal fashion and are articulated by representatives of the largest, most successful firms. They are propagated by the business press and informal links between organizations and then are supported by those organizations and organizational fields.
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.
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.
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