The Making of an Industry: Electricity in the United States

Although economic sociology has enjoyed a strong resurgence in recent years, it has focused on relatively low or high levelsof aggregation. One central concern has been what determines the actions of individuals and firms, and another the role of government and largescale interest groups in the governance and evolution of the economy. With some notable exceptions (eg, Hirsch, 1972; Campbell, Lindberg and Hollingsworth, 1992; Dobbin, 1994; Roy, 1997), few have paid close attention to middle levels of aggregation such as industries. Problems of industrial organization have largely been left to economists, who treat industry boundaries as resulting unproblematically from the nature of the product, the state of technology at a given time (as summed up by production functions), consumer demand, and the attempt to reduce production and transaction costs. Sociologists have reacted to some general arguments on the subject of organizational form, especially those of Chandler (1962, 1975, 1990) and Williamson (1975, 1985), and to some of the other standard assumptions. But these critiques, whatever their merits, have been largely defensive; they have followed and responded to economic arguments rather than setting the agenda with a distinctively sociological position about industry and organizational form. A substantial sociology of industry must be a persuasive alternative based on serious research about particular industries and their evolution, rooted in a coherent view of how people and organizations form and co-operate in such a way as to produce those goods and services that consumers demand. We do not dispute the convenience of defining industries as sets of firms that produce the same or related products. But we argue