Abstract (EN)

The article formalizes an elementary structure of the capitalist firm considered as an organization build on the wage relationship, and then elaborates a typology of its different possible forms. Such a structure of the firm is derived from the axioms that John R. Commons assumes to be at the basis of his understanding of institutional economics. In a first section, we show that Commons develops a conceptualization - a formula in his own language – of the firm as form of a more general organization called « going concern ». This conceptualization clearly distinguishes organizations from institutions, and finely articulates contractual and hierarchical relations between the members of concerns. In a second section, we specify the Commons’ formula of the organization of a capitalist firm through the introduction of the wage relationship as an hybrid of contracts and hierarchies. In a third section, this formula of the capitalist going concern is used, through a deductive structural analysis, to build a typology of firms that fits to ideal-types induced from evidence in the litterature on the topic. Thus Commons’ institutional economics appears to be useful to catch up the diversity of wage-relationships on which plurality of the types of capitalist firms is based.