Transactions and Organizational Forms: A Re-analysis

This paper is an attempt to extend and amplify the concept of transaction and its relation to alternative organizational forms. Based on the institutional economics tradition of Commons (1924), the economics of internal organizations (Williamson 1975), and recent developments in organization theory (Ouchi 1980), it proposes a conceptual scheme to explain what distinguishes organizational forms and the transformation of these forms under the condition of future uncertainty. The implications of this framework for organization theory and design are also discussed.