I went on to argue that this long-standing sociological view of what really happens in organizations has important commonalities with recent economic models by the likes of Bengt Holmstrom, David Kreps, Paul Milgrom, John Roberts, and Jean Tirole. For example, I described how one page from Crozier’s (1964) case study anticipated key elements of Milgrom and Roberts’s (1988) model of how the prospect of influence activities shapes second-best organizational design. More generally, I argued that modern organizational economics has departed from Marschak and Radner’s (1972) “Team Theory” in an empirically relevant way, and in so doing has unknowingly converged with.
