Corporations, Classes, and Social Movements After Managerialism

Abstract

The traditional focus in organization theory on corporations as bounded, countable units of social structure is a poor fit with the emerging nature of the new economy. Increasingly ‘boundaryless’ production processes, and the predominance of evaluative standards based in financial markets, undermine the explanatory usefulness of theories such as resource dependence and population ecology. Yet economic theories of the firm are ill-equipped to make sense of the social and political processes that shape the structure and evolution of the corporation. This chapter argues that social movement theory provides an explanatory approach well-suited to forms of coordinated collective action in a post-industrial economy. We illustrate the argument by comparing the emerging media industry to the emergence of a national social movement, and everyday workings of the network economy of Silicon Valley to the routine mobilization of local movement activity. We close by describing four areas for future research.