This course is about the determination of firm boundaries. Firm boundaries are perpetually in flux. This change mirrors changes in the institutional context within which firms find themselves. The course provides a framework to help think through the relationship between the institutional context and the determination of firm boundaries.
Most industrial activity is carried out within firms whose boundaries span multiple businesses.
Due to the dominant role such firms play in economic activity, it is likely that most students, regardless of their chosen career paths, will at some point either work for, advise, or compete with multibusiness firms in some part of the world. The nature of these firms has undergone enormous change in the last thirty years. In the U.S., merger and acquisition booms of the sixties and eighties extended their scope. More recently, capital market pressures forced these firms to reassess their levels of overhead and the ways in which they coordinate and control their multibusiness activities. One of the changes that has occured recently is the almost bewildering complexity of organizational forms now available to organize economic activity.