Economic Organization, Capabilities and Coordination

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CAPABILITIES AND THE THEORY OF THE FIRM

Richard N. Langlois

INTRODUCTION

It is a long-established habit of economists (and other intellectuals) to unearth precursors who can help support their claims to legitimacy. Keynes offered Malthus and the mercantilists; Jevons dredged up Dionysius Lardner and Fleeming Jenkins. Such precursors are always easy to find. As Alfred North Whitehead is supposed to have written, ‘everything new has been said before by someone who didn’t discover it’. The implication is that discovery is a matter not of saying something for the first time but of saying it at the right time, that is, of offering a new idea precisely when the relevant intellectual community is prepared, for whatever reasons, to accept it.¹ But ...