Rethinking Agency: Toward an Organizational View of the Economy

For more than a century, economics has been built on the idea that individuals are the central actors in economic life. This conviction, deeply embedded in both classical and neoclassical thought, asserts that people possess preferences, make autonomous choices, respond rationally to incentives, and collectively generate the emergent order we call “the market.” At its core, this worldview imagines an economy composed of countless individuals whose interactions, mediated by price signals, produce efficient outcomes.

Yet the contours of the contemporary economy no longer resemble this portrait. Across the past century, organizations, corporations, bureaucracies, financial institutions, state agencies, have grown in scale and complexity to a degree unimaginable to earlier generations. These entities command vast resources, operate at speeds and scales far beyond human cognition, and exhibit continuity that outlives any individual member. Their operations shape, influence, and increasingly determine the environment in which humans make decisions. It is no longer clear that the individual, as traditionally conceived, remains the primary agent in the economic landscape.

This paper proposes a simple but radical question: what if we have been looking at the economy from the wrong perspective? What if the true adaptive agents in modern economic systems are not individuals, but organizations?