Introduction: New Forms of Organization and the Coordination of Political and Commercial Actors

In 1991, Herbert Simon convincingly argued that it would be significantly more accurate to refer to the modern “organizational economy” rather than the capitalist “market economy” (Simon, 1991, p. 28). Despite the centrality of commercial organizations to modern life, formal organizations are more likely to be viewed as inhabitants of the modern world of state and markets than structures actively involved in the development of capitalism. The two most significant recent bodies of work on the rise of capitalism pay little attention to formally constituted organizations: the new institutionalism in economics is focused on the rise of market institutions, and sociologists of the early modern have devoted the majority of their energies to explaining the process of state-building. It is not until the twentieth century, and the maturation of the capitalist economy, that large, non-state organizations begin to get their due in the social sciences – despite the importance of formally constituted organizations to the economic and political developments in the eras of merchant and industrial capitalism. The goal of this special issue is to pull away from state-centrism and market-fundamentalism in order to foreground the role of new forms of non-state collectivities in constructing the institutions and patterns of the modern world.