Transaction Cost Economics and Organization Theory

Economic and sociological approaches to economic organization have reached a state of healthy tension. That is to be contrasted with an earlier state of affairs in which the two approaches were largely disjunct, hence ignored one another, or described each other’s research agendas and re search accomplishments with disdain (Swedberg, 1990, p. 4). Healthy tension involves genuine give-and-take. Neither the obsolescence of organization theory, to which Charles Perrow has recently alluded (1992, p. 162), nor the capitulation of economics, to which James March (tongue-incheek) remarks, is implied.