Private, Public, or Cooperative? Organizational Form and Economic Diversity in the U.S. Electrical Utility Industry, 1900-1950

私人、公共还是合作？

• 批准号: 0318466
• 负责人: Marc Schneiberg
• 金额: $ 8.56万
• 依托单位: Reed College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-07-01 至 2006-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0318466&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Private; Public; Cooperative; Organizational; Form

ABSTRACTWhen do consumers and local governments pursue cooperative or publicly owned alternatives to for-profit corporations? What conditions foster such alternatives to dominant forms of economic organization? Since the 1900s, Americans have depended heavily on private, investor owned utility corporations for generating, transmitting, and distributing electricity. During this time private utilities helped build a technologically sophisticated, national electricity system. At the same time, however, many private utility corporations regularly failed to act in consumers' or the public interest by working aggressively to eliminate competition, corrupting public officials, and routinely charging high rates, while leaving whole classes of communities under- or unserved. In response, consumer groups, reformers, and local public officials pursued new forms of power provision, organizing over 2500 local, publicly owned municipal utilities between 1900 and 1930 and nearly 1000 electrical cooperatives during the late 1930 and early 1940s. This study is an historical and quantitative analysis of when and how Americans consumers pursued alternatives to private corporations and regulated monopoly in the critical electric power infrastructure sector. I draw hypotheses from sociological, historical, and rational-choice institutionalism to examine how the economics of organization induced actors to turn to public and cooperative enterprise, and how politics, existing organizational ecologies, and institutional embeddedness enabled actors to pursue those forms. A key question here is whether public and cooperative solutions to utility market problems were built on the organizational legacies of struggles to establish alternatives to corporations in other periods and sectors. The proposed research will contribute to organizational analysis by shedding new light on the capacity of institutional systems to support organizational diversity and the production of new organizational forms, and it will revise current views of the organizational history of American capitalism, documenting how the U.S. economy crystallized around not one, but at least two logics or industrial orders during the critical late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study also will help to foster a challenging and research based educational environment at Reed College by providing undergraduate student assistants involved in the project with extended, hands-on research training and a range of new research skills, while producing data sets and techniques that can be used for course and research based program development. Equally important, this study will provide information on policy options currently being debated in the utility industry, notably the use of public ownership and cooperatives to solve regulatory failures in electrical utility markets.

摘要何时消费者和地方政府从事营利性公司的合作或公共替代方案？ 哪些条件为主要的经济组织形式促进了这种替代方案？ 自1900年代以来，美国人一直依靠私人，投资者拥有的公用事业公司来发电，传输和分发电力。 在此期间，私人公用事业有助于建立技术复杂的国家电力系统。 然而，与此同时，许多私营公用事业公司经常通过积极努力消除竞争，腐败公职人员并经常收取高利率，同时使整个社区不受欢迎或无关紧要。 作为回应，消费者团体，改革者和地方官员追求了新的权力提供形式，在1900年至1930年之间组织了2500多个本地公共的市政公用事业，并在1940年代末和1940年代初组织了近1000个电气合作社。 这项研究是对美国消费者何时以及如何寻求私人公司的替代方案并在关键电力基础设施部门进行垄断的替代方案的历史和定量分析。 我从社会学，历史和理性选择的制度主义中提出假设，以研究组织的经济学如何诱使参与者转向公共和合作企业，以及政治，现有的组织生态以及机构嵌入如何使参与者追求这些形式。 这里的一个关键问题是，公共和合作解决方案是建立在其他时期和部门建立公司替代方案的组织遗产之上的。拟议的研究将通过对机构系统的能力支持组织多样性和新组织形式的生产的能力进行新的启示，从而为组织分析做出贡献，它将修改对美国资本主义组织历史的当前观点，记录美国经济在九年级和十二世纪初期至少两种至少两个逻辑或工业命令中如何结晶的。 这项研究还将通过为参与该项目的本科生助理提供扩展的，动手的研究培训和一系列新的研究技能，同时生产可用于基于课程和研究计划的计划开发，从而有助于培养里德学院的具有挑战性和基于研究的教育环境。 同样重要的是，这项研究将提供有关目前在公用事业行业辩论的政策选择的信息，尤其是使用公众所有权和合作社来解决电气公用事业市场中的监管失败。