“Business firms, in which controlled cooperation takes place, are the first important implication of costly transactions. The laissez-faire filtering process, using the profit test, selects some of these business organizations for survival and rejects others.”

Source: Economic, Political, and Legal Dimensions of Competition. 1980, p. 25

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Harold Demsetz7

American economist 1930–2019

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“The question always is, will it pay to bring an extra exchange transaction under the organizing authority? At the margin, the costs of organizing within the firm will be equal either to the costs of organizing in another firm or to the costs involved in leaving the transaction to be “organised” by the price mechanism. Business men will be constantly experimenting, controlling more or less, and in this way equilibrium will be maintained. This gives the position of equilibrium for static analysis.”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

Source: 1930s-1950s, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), p. 404

“Why… are there any market transactions at all? Why not all production carried on by one big firm?… First, as a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organizing additional transactions within the firm may rise… Second, it may be that as the transactions which are organized increase, the entrepreneur fails to place the factors of production in the uses where their value is greatest, that is, fails to make the best use of the factors of production… Finally, the supply price of one or more of the factors of production may rise, because the "other advantages" of a small firm are greater than those of a large firm.”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

Source: 1930s-1950s, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), p. 394-5

“The mark of a capitalistic society is that resources are owned and allocated by such nongovernmental organizations as firms, households, and markets. Resource owners increase productivity through cooperative specialization and this leads to the demand for economic organizations which facilitate cooperation. When a lumber mill employs a cabinetmaker, cooperation between specialists is achieved within a firm, and when a cabinetmaker purchases wood from a lumberman, the cooperation takes place across markets (or between firms). Two important problems face a theory of economic organization—to explain the conditions that determine whether the gains from specialization and cooperative production can better be obtained within an organization like the firm, or across markets, and to explain the structure of the organization.”

Harold Demsetz (1930–2019) American economist

Source: Production, information costs, and economic organization. 1972, p. 777, Lead paragraph

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Source: Production, information costs, and economic organization. 1972, p. 777, Lead paragraph

“Restricting copying is not the only basis for business in software. It is the most common basis because it brings in the most money. If it were prohibited, or rejected by the customer, software business would move to other bases of organization which are now used less often. There are always numerous ways to organize any kind of business.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

“First, most producers are employees of firms, not owners. Viewed from the vantage point of classical [economic] theory, they have no reason to maximize the profits of firms, except to the extent that they can be controlled by owners. Moreover, profit-making firms, nonprofit organizations, and bureaucratic organizations all have exactly the same problem of inducing their employees to work toward organizational goals. There is no reason, a priori, why it should be easier (or harder) to produce this motivation in organizations aimed at maximizing profits than in organizations with different goals. If it is true in an organizational economy that organizations motivated by profits will be more efficient than other organizations, additional postulates will have to be introduced to account for it.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1991) "Organizations and Markets:" in: Journal of Economic Perspectives. 5 (2 Spring 1991): p. 28.
1980s and later

“Once in place as control perspectives, they are widely shared ways of reducing complexity of the world. They come into the existence in a piecemeal fashion and are articulated by representatives of the largest, most successful firms. They are propagated by the business press and informal links between organizations and then are supported by those organizations and organizational fields.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 12

“A firm may be defined as an institution which buys things, transforms them in some way, and then sells them with the purpose of making a profit. The things a firm buys we shall call "inputs." The things it sells we shall call "outputs." The process whereby the things it buys are transformed into the things it sells we shall call the "process of production." In any process of buying to sell again a process of production is always involved…
A business, therefore, is a process whereby certain inputs, valued in dollars in some way, are transformed into outputs, also valued in dollars in some way.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 377

“A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Source: The Startup Owner’s Manual (2012), p. xvii.

“A business process is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes.”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: Reengineering the Corporation, 1993, p. 35

“Business firms, in which controlled cooperation takes place, are the first important implication of costly transactions. The laissez-faire filtering process, using the profit test, selects some of these business organizations for survival and rejects others.”

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Harold Demsetz7

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