Governance structures, coordination mechanisms and cognitive models

This paper criticizes the current prevailing ways of modelling governance alternatives, and advocates the opportunity and feasibility of a reconceptualization of governance forms as mixes or configurations of simpler and potentially disentangleable components. These components are constituted by a bundle of property rights and by a set of coordination mechanisms. The paper draws on a previous effort at integrating economic, organizational and sociological theories of governance in a cognitive perspective (Grandori 1995a) and explicitates how some cognitive foundations of organization theory can be revised to sustain a more fine-grained view of governance. The implications for organization design are illustrated in the final section through the solution of some empirical design problems, as well as through a reinterpretation of known hybrid arrangements. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.