La governance del sistema impresa tra istituzionalizzazione e azione del soggetto imprenditoriale
This contribution proposes a reflection upon the governance of the firm based on some concepts – such as power, coalitional games, institutional frame – that, in the current debate, have not received the right attention, due to the prevalence of strong thoughts that have dominated the scene, perhaps beyond their explanatory power.Avoiding to incur in its reification or humanization, the firm is seen as a concrete entity, definable only ex post, since it is the product of the interactions among actors that cannot be classified according to predefined schemes, roles, functions, categories from which their aims and actions derive. Thus, the firms government and management dynamics are reviewed within a conceptual frame, where the entrepreneurial subject (individual or group) is intended as a strategic actor constantly involved in processes of construction and deconstruction of the organizational reality, although within an institutional frame that is pro tempore binding. Keeping the distance from the two pure archetypes of rationality – subjective and systemic – the firms government action is here directed by a weakened rationality. According to it, a pro tempore dominant coalition, while allocating the resources, selects, among the options made available by the pro tempore binding institutional framework, the actors for the value exchanges, in order to pursue specific aims. In this processes, the dominant coalition acts sometimes in dependant, sometimes in powerful position, within a frame of coalitional games. Under this perspective, the governance of the firm and of the organizational structures behind the firm emerges as the result of a continuous combination of the action and institutionalization processes.
