Finding our way in the jungle: insights from organization theory

Claude Ménard (1)

1 CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne

This contribution is about the variety of modalities of coordination of economic activities, with application to the agrifood sector. Building on recent developments in organization theory and institutional analysis, it explores two dimensions along which coordination operates: it proposes an extended transactional model to explain the variety of coordination devices, with a special emphasis on contracts and their role in hybrid arrangements; and it characterizes the different layers composing the institutional setting in which these arrangements are embedded, with an emphasis on the long ignored or neglected role of the intermediate, ‘meso-institutional’ layer. Insights are also provided on the technological background to coordination and on some policy issues.

Mots clés: Transactions; contracts; property rights; hybrid organizations; meso-institutions

Domaines: Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]; Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Claude Ménard. Finding our way in the jungle: insights from organization theory. Gaetano Martino, Konstantinos Karantininis, Stefano Pascucci, Liesbeth Dries and Jean Marie Codron (eds). It’s a jungle out there – the strange animals of economic organization in agri-food value chains, Wageningen Academic Publishers, pp.27-50, 2017, 978-90-8686-301-3. ⟨10.3920/978-90-8686-844-5_1⟩. ⟨hal-04001137⟩