Situating Business Strategies: Institutions and Regulation

Abstract

The methodological individualism underlying orthodox economic thought has traditionally been challenged from two directions. According to the first, strategic action is rooted in far-reaching political–economic structures which determine the scope for action and a firm’s development path. There is agreement in the political–economic literature that since the early 1970s advanced capitalist economies have undergone momentous change and that changes in the spheres of production and consumption are deeply intertwined with shifts in the way the economy is regulated and sustained (see Boyer, 1990a; Esping-Andersen, 1994; Martin, 1994; Offe, 1984; Tickell and Peck, 1992). The second view, the socio–cultural or socio–economic perspective, focuses on the fact that economic activities are shaped not only by an instrumental economic rationality, but are also deeply implicated in social, cultural and political institutions. From this perspective economic action is embedded in a dense web of ‘non-economic’ factors.