From Techno-Scientific Grammar to Organizational Syntax: New Production Insights on the Nature of the Firm

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of the role of technology for the firm's organization. In particular, it aims at showing how the role of production in investigating the existence, boundaries, organization and dynamics of the firm can be better understood through a two-fold multidisciplinary exercise: on the one hand, by drawing on engineering a more accurate description of the production process itself, which helps figuring out its inner complexity and potentially explosive nature; on the other hand, by referring to computational linguistics for a deeper account of the nature of economic agents and of those mechanisms through which they are able to make what is potentially explosive actually ordered.

In order to fulfil this aim, we will set the production process within a complexity framework, resulting from the dynamic mapping accross different, multiple spaces of search. In this way we will furnish a novel vision of the firm as a set of emergent properties at the dynamic interweaving of stability and variability, simplicity and complexity, orderly and chaotic behaviour. The nature of the firm will thus come to be defined in terms of production possibilities that are constructed by, on the one side, the human attitute towards pattern seeking activity, and, on the other side, a push-and-pull non-linear mechanism that forces the emergence of firms at the edge of chaos.

Keywords: dynamic capabilities, economics of the firm, complex adaptive systems

JEL Classification: D23, L22, O33