Institutionslist focus in business management its influence in the análisis of governance

Abstract

We agree to consider Strategic Management as a methodology assimilation of the high management of organizations, and we want to center the interest of this work, in the institutional dimension as nuclear factor for the understanding of the enterprise, which has been developed in contrast to the ideas of the economics neoclassicist theory. This theory dominates the focus of the analysis of the socioeconomics phenomena that starts off from some suppositions that go beyond the pure economics theory, because they are of philosophical order, as the individualistic conception of the socioeconomics reality 3. In their economics conception the idea of the possibility of an optimum balance dominates, (between offer and demand), achieved thanks to the market mechanism, conceived according to the asseveration of the invisible hand, and in which from the impulses of those decision subject, that try to maximize their benefits (comparing optimum with quantified maximum), one arrives, without more coordination mechanisms or planning, to that optimum state of the group. The Economics theoreticians continue considering, in general, as irrelevant, the advances achieved in the management and enterprise sciences (management)4. But these last ones are also quite skeptical, facing what they consider very abstract theories and far from the concrete reality, as they do not see the possibility of obtaining practical application to run, in a better way, an enterprise or a business. Thus even the separation between both types of focus, has been institutionalized, reaching a very different academic curricula structure: economics sciences or enterprise management and administration sciences. In any case, such mutual skepticism (and ignorance) should be critically reexamined, as it is possible that they are simply based on misunderstandings. One of them is the supposedly exclusivity and uniformity of the classic position. In fact, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or Thomas Malthus' ideas, are very different from those that defend the current theoretical economics. Facing the presumed unicity of the orthodox thought (neo-classic) there are divergent currents: the Austrian school, Marxism, the Post-Keynesian, the behaviorist or the institucionalistic. Due to this one should not mistake the dominant theory (the one usually explained in the classrooms) with the other theories still effective in this field of knowledge. Such exclusivity presumptions, formulate more dogmatic fundamentalisms than a scientific attitude. Within a varied horizon of focuses, the different tendencies that have been denominated as institucionalistic try to enlarge the analysis field, incorporating other factors that allow a more appropriate vision of the analyzed phenomena. This enlargement of the theoretical horizon is carried out, mainly, in reference to the surroundings and the market relationships which they generate. That overcoming of the traditional vision, is centered in the statement that the economics theory should also concern the company. In the traditional economics theory, it was not even treated, the organizations were not studied as a social institution, but as mere support to the production function (or a combination of cost minimizing factors). Now, this school picks up the terms institution and institutionalization that have been defined in very diverse ways, by the different research currents that exist inside it… MAIN.