Can an Economy Survive Without Corporations? Technology and Robust Organizational Alternatives
认为传统公司正因交易成本变化和小规模生产技术的兴起而衰落，并探讨了合作社、互助组织、开源社区和平台等非公司制替代方案，对关注企业形态演变的学者有参考价值。
Shareholder-owned corporations were dominant for much of the 20th century in the United States, yet their numbers are substantially declining in the 21st. This article argues that we are observing a regime shift in the transaction costs of organizing that disfavors traditional corporations. Accompanying this shift is the emergence of low-cost, small-scale production technologies that will allow locally based universal fabrication facilities. In combination, these changes are compatible with new forms of non-corporate enterprise. While corporations are basic units of production in many theories about the economy, they should be regarded as only one hypothesis about how production is and can be organized. Traditional alternatives to the corporation include producer and consumer cooperatives (e.g., Land o’ Lakes, REI) and mutuals (e.g., State Farm, Vanguard). More recent possibilities include commons-based peer production (such as Linux and Wikipedia) and “platforms” that connect buyers and sellers (such as Uber and Airbnb). The raw materials are available for more democratic and locally oriented enterprise. Management scholarship has an opportunity to document and encourage this movement.