Building and Governing A Territory

Abstract

A market is generally thought of as an action space that relies primarily on pricing for its organization. Businesses in the market essentially have a commercial function alone. By contrast, a hierarchy is based on principles of legitimate authority: asymmetric relations are established among its specialized areas, imposing an action plan on them (Thoenig 1998). A network, another space of economic action, can be structured around the business’s capacity to occupy a structural void once it has successfully polarized numerous relationships with third-party partners that it otherwise wouldn’t have had any direct contact with (Burt 1992).