In this introductory piece, we take stock of the impact of Cyert and March’s A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, describe current research trends in the behavioral tradition, and introduce the special issue’s papers. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm is one of the most influential management books of all time. In the book, Cyert and March developed theoretical building blocks that became the foundat...

Organizational studies is a fragmented field. Its foundations are the disciplines of Psychology, Sociology, and Economics and applied fields such as Industrial Psychology, Labor Relations, Human Resource Management, Organization Development and Management. Each field of inquiry focuses on different phenomena, employs different research methods and makes different assumptions about the nature of...

In this paper an extension is given of the set of concepts considered to be basic to the fields of Economics, Organization Theory, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. The modeling is in terms of automata and automata networks. In the first paper on basic concepts the simplest unit, the social atom, stood central. In this second paper social structures and processes are focused upon.

Institutional Change Institutional approaches to the study of organizations provide an active and fruitful line of (1949) inquiry into how organizations become institutions, contemporary institutional analysis asks how organizations are influenced by institutionalized rules and institutional environments-forces that operate, by definition, above and across organizations. Much research documents...

The IS literature allows to identify the role played by the characteristics of the people and the characteristics of the tools in the uses if an ICT tool. However, these papers have in common to develop a very narrow analysis of them. They have difficulties to take into account the organization as a whole. Numerous papers ask for a greater consideration of the organization into the analysis of ...

In this paper the results are given of an investigation into concepts from Economics, Organization Theory, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. The goal of this investigation was to find out whether there is a set of concepts that may be considered to be basic to all these five social sciences. The set of concepts found will be modeled in terms of automata, thus providing a way of unify...

The most recent efforts in institutional theory applied to organization studies search for ways to overcome consequences of traditional dichotomies based on levels of analysis, social structures versus agency as source of practices, and so on. If in other social sciences that debate has received fundamental contributions in the last three or four decades, this is not the case for Organization T...

This paper explores the contribution and the influence of system dynamics in the development of management and organisation theory. It begins with a brief discussion of the contribution of computer modelling and simulation in theory development for the above areas. It then discusses the practice of management theory development from the sociology of science perspective using Bourdieu’s concepts...

Interorganizational networks are increasingly the subject of both theoretical and empirical research in sociology, economics, organizational behavior, and public and business management. While the most common network concepts and studies have focused on multi-organizational forms of production, “network” has also emerged as a way to describe how organizations share and integrate knowledge and i...

Are interorganizational network ties “placeless” or “placed”? The study of organizations, particularly the study of interorganizational network ties, has reemerged in urban sociology, yet the urban literature on place and the organizations literatures on organizational network activity are not fully integrated. This article bridges these theories through an investigation of the social and spati...