Comparative Analysis of Organizational Forms in the Software Industry and Legal Services

Arbeitspapier

Law firms are expected to be controlled by the workers because given the diffculty of monitoring labor, the transaction cost would be very high and the essential human capital investment would be lacking in a firm controlled by the capital suppliers. Expectations are confirmed by the data. However, following the same reasoning one can easily suggest that software firms should also be controlled by the labor suppliers given the similar diffculty of monitoring labor and essential human capital. As in a law firm, the software firm uses very generic capital such as offices, computers and programming languages. Moreover, the human capital of the software developer is indispensable and highly firm specific. While we observe widespread worker control in terms of partnerships in legal service industry, the majority of the software firms are not controlled by the labor suppliers: instead they are controlled by the capital suppliers.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Papers in Economics ; No. 09/03

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Firm Behavior: Theory ; Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
• Subject: Organizational forms ; Asset specificity ; Softwareindustrie ; Organisationsstruktur ; Rechtsberatung

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Duman, Alper
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Izmir University of Economics, Department of Economics
• (where): Izmir
• (when): 2009

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/175904
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET