Organizational Learning and Institutional Embeddedness

This book can be read from a variety of angles. One is from the point of view of its contribution to an emerging theory of the firm based on the problem-solving competences that organizations embody. From another angle, one may appreciate what it adds to the understanding of the variety in the patterns of evolution of business corporations in different countries. Yet from another perspective, it may be considered a contribution to the analysis of how the broader institutional context shapes and constrains corporate strategies and organizational change. Indeed, our suggestion is that these perspectives are highly complementary, unified by what we shall call, paraphrasing Richard Nelson, a theory of coevolution linking organizational forms, technologies and institutions. Admittedly, one is still far from the full development of such a theory: however, contributions like those contained in this volume suggest, in our view, the promises of the research programme and the constructiveness of a dialogue between historians, economists and scholars from other social disciplines, whereby theories and historical analyses mutually enrich each other. It is a dialogue which runs from ‘foundational issues’ — concerning, for example, what is the nature of business organizations, what degree of rationality one should attribute to economic agents, etc. — all the way to the ‘grand’ historical conjectures on the determinants of the broad patterns of socio-economic organizations as we observe them. It is this thread that we shall explore in this introduction.