Power in Firms as Political Entities: Dependency, Strategy and Resistance.

Concomitant with the exacerbation of globalization, the firm has become a major institutional actor of economic change. However, it must be noted that the economics of the firm has been developed since the 1970s as a disciplinary subfield of economic science without paying any real attention to the concepts and practices of power. The firm is undoubtedly not only an economic but also a social and political entity. One cannot free the firm from the relations of power without missing a very substantial part of the constitutive elements of the firm, notably the struggling games and strategies of actors (firm members) who evolve in open institutional systems. Therefore, it is useful to turn to certain influent sociological and philosophical perspectives to understand power dynamics in the firm from an economic point of view. More precisely, to highlight the individual actors' games that constitute the evolution of firms' dynamics as complex and strategic systems, it is essential to pay particular attention to three aspects: (1) dependency; (2) strategy; and (3) resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]