The New Institutionalist features

The Nature of the Firm de R. Coase (1937), with its explicit introduction of transaction costs into economic analysis, is a first step in the renewal of the nstitutionalism in a neoclassical setting. The nature of the firm of Coase tries to explain the factors that determine the relative costs of coordination by management within the firm or by transactions on the market. The institutional infrastructure of markets determines the costs of economic activities. In the theory of organizations, following Coase, there is an opposition between firm and market. Market as a moment of anonymous clash between individual wants of exchange goods and services. The competitive market is an anonymous market which is complete and perfect regarding to required informational structure. The firm is an economic organization aiming to realize net profits. That is a merchant/trading structure. It is made up of different elements and individuals which are heterogeneous with separate aims and resources. The firm set a common target in order to federate the private and separate individual objectives under a specific hierarchical structure. Coase suggested a specific approach called the transaction costs theory: choice between market and firm in terms of arbitration relatively to their respective

cost/advantage calculus. Market and firm are alternative coordination devices of economic activities. Therefore, the firm is considered as a changing entity with an Internal coordination mechanism in order to check and to incite the individual behaviours. It is a coalition with common targets, established, negotiated and evaluated according to a common set of rules in order to reach a consensus. The main object of these approaches consists in filling the neoclassical black box of tools with economic institutions allowing agents to adopt efficient behaviours and coherent decisions. The institutionalists think that there is no such thing as perfect enforcement of any set of rules and informal constraints. We can set the main differences between the evolutionist/regulationist approaches and the new institutionalist approach throughout the following figure:

A methodological alternative: Schumpeterian