Production Networks

Description

Milton Mueller in Networks and States, as explained by Clay Spinuzzi:

""In economics and economic sociology, network has come to mean a mode of governance that differs from managerial hierarchies and markets" (p.34). He explains how "In the 1980s, theorists began to observe looser affiliations among multiple firms - outsourcing, franchising, research alliances, and other semi-autonomous relations - and to discuss how this phenomenon fit into the market-hierarchy dichotomy" (p.31). Although "the initial tendency was to describe them as hybrid organizational forms somewhere 'between markets and hierarchies,'" sociologist Walter Powell argued that they constituted a distinctive organizational form "based on the relationship rather than the transaction" (p.34)." (http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/2011/03/reading-networks-and-states.html)