THE SOCIAL-SPATIAL CONSTITUTION OF BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS - A GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Business organizations are important subjects in organizational studie s, but their social-spatial constitution is largely caricatured in the existing theoretical literature. This paper examines the nature and o perations of business organizations, arguing that the concept of busin ess organizations embraces more than their rigid separation from the e xternal environment. Business organizations should rather be conceptua lized as causal agencies capable of exercising their peculiar modes of rationality; they gain causal powers from ongoing networks of social relations embedded in society and space. The quest for control, power and strategic advantages provides the central dynamics to a continuous process of structuration between business organizations and their net work relations. In practice, business organizations become a network f orm of governance structure that replaces ''spaces of firms'' by ''spa ces of network relations''. Because business organizations are embedde d in network relations, they must also be embedded in geographically s pecific localities in order to reproduce themselves. This notion of th e geographical embeddedness of business organization is further illust rated with an example of Chinese business organizations from Hong Kong . Some elements of a future research agenda are proposed in the conclu ding section.