The Firm as Social Networks: An Organisational Perspective

This paper offers an organizational perspective on the firm in new economic geographies. It starts with the premise of the firm as a production function in neoclassical economics and a cost minimisation device in transaction cost economics. By pointing out the inadequacy in these mainstream economic perspectives on the firm, I draw upon recent behavioral and managerial theories to develop a relational conception of the firm as social networks in which actors are embedded in ongoing power relations and discursive processes. In further elaborating this relational perspective on the firm as an organisational device, I show how the firm is governed through social relations among different actors, how it is a site of contested ideologies and political representations among these actors, and how space and geographical scales matter in shaping its social construction. Taken together, this organisational perspective aims to shift our research agenda in urban and regional development from promoting the growth of the firm per se to understanding how the firm serves as a relational institution that connects spatially differentiated actors in different places and regions. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..