Taking coase seriously

In this essay I advance two related theses. First, economic theory predicts that organizations will be a mess but not a mystery. Second, classic case studies conducted by organizational sociologists support this prediction. F ully articulating and defending these theses will require a book, so my goa l here is simply to render them plausible. I begin by pointing toward the r elevant economic theory and sociological evidence, but I devote the bulk of the essay to a particular example: I develop a formal economic model inspi red by a passage from Michel Crozier's The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. I concl ude by discussing the potential roles of formal economic modeling in organi zational research.*