Oliver E. Williamson, who died on May 21, 2020 at the age of 87, was one of the most influential social scientists of modern times. In 2009, he was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. As of mid-October 2021, he had been cited an astonishing 317,838 times according to Google Scholar. His measured influence outdistances that of even his fellow Nobel Laureates Elinor Ostrom (230,667), Douglass C. North (187,577) and Ronald H. Coase (123,686). This special issue of the Journal of Institutional Economics brings together a distinguished roster of scholars to remember Williamson, to elucidate some of his key ideas and influences, and to extend the reach of his ideas to new arenas.

This contribution commemorates Oliver Williamson, who recently passed away, as one of the founding fathers of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). It does so by touching on some of the details of his personal life and connecting these with his professional career. The latter was devoted to putting the study of institutions on the economic agenda. Closer scrutiny reveals that three phases may be identified. Williamson first developed an interest in analysing vertical integration. During the second phase, he elaborated this interest in TCE, and during the third, he positioned his contributions within the area of institutional economics. Furthermore, the article considers the various influences of institutional and organizational economists on Williamson. Finally, the article considers the reception, criticism, and further elaborations of Williamson's contributions.

Joseph Campbell describes a narrative pattern for a hero's journey. ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from the mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man’ (2008: 30). This paper looks at Oliver E. Williamson's life through Campbell's lens and reveals his journey, challenges, and triumphs not only for himself but also for all students of the science of organization.

Oliver Williamson's contributions to the theory of the firm were of course seminal. Yet, they were not originally formulated to address the central question in strategic management: Why do some firms persistently outperform others in financial terms? We suggest that when Williamson did address this question, his efforts were not compelling. We also suggest, however, that with suitable adjustments, the key mechanisms in Williamson's theory can indeed usefully address this question.

More than 30 years ago, I engaged in a debate with Oliver Williamson over the theoretical structure of transaction cost economics (TCE). This debate had its origins in our conflicting views of the labor-managed firm (LMF). Williamson believed that such firms were rare due to their inefficiency while I believed they might be rare due to market failures. Here I clarify my criticisms of TCE and contrast Williamson's view of the LMF with my own approach. I discuss empirical evidence that can distinguish between these two approaches and take up Williamson's challenge to identify policy interventions that could yield net social gains.

The major contribution of Oliver Williamson, who was a 2009 Nobel Prize co-Laureate in economics, consists of proposing a heuristic analysis of governance structures, namely, the firm, the market, and what he will later call the ‘hybrid forms’. This cardinal issue in organizational economics has made it possible to propose rigorous arbitration tools for the famous ‘make or buy’ decisions in modern market economies based on asset specificity and quasi-rents. However, Williamson's work goes far beyond these contributions alone. His contribution is based on a multidisciplinary theoretical background in building the science of organization. This is the important but sometimes neglected aspect of Williamson's work that I wish to highlight in this paper in memory of Williamson in regard to three major pieces on atmosphere (and informal organization), private ordering, and industrial pluralism. In doing so, I also propose reconsidering the different stages of Williamson's evolving science of organization from recent neo-institutional works.

In this essay, we honour the memory of Oliver Williamson by reflecting on Chiles and McMackin's 1996 Academy of Management Review article ‘Integrating variable risk preferences, trust, and transaction cost economics’. The article, which built on Williamson's work in transaction cost economics (TCE), went on to attract attention not only from the authors’ home discipline of management and organisation studies, but also from other business disciplines, the professions and the social sciences. After revisiting the article's origins and core arguments, we turn to selectively (re)view TCE's development since 1996 through the lens of this article, focusing on trust, risk and subjective costs. We cover conceptual and empirical developments in each of these areas and reflect on how our review contributes to previous debates concerning trade-offs implicit in relaxing TCE's behavioural assumptions. We conclude by reflecting on key points of learning from our review and possible implications for future research.

This essay explores six sentences from Oliver Williamson – five providing context and the sixth the central topic. Decades ago, Williamson asserted that: (a) ‘substantially the same factors’ (1973: 316) create governance issues not only within organizations but also in interactions between organizations; and (b) relational contracting might be useful in addressing these issues in both domains (1979, Figure II). More recently – in an informal conversation in 2002 – he suggested a perspective on relational contracting that appears valuable in both of these domains: relational contracts as ‘deals that start when you sign them’. The bulk of this essay explores past, present, and potential research on this perspective.

Williamson's legacy will be permanently, and deservedly, linked with the theory of the firm. As important, however, is his contribution to our understanding of contracting. My aim here is to describe Williamson's conception of contracting, how it differs from other approaches to contracting, and some implications of that approach for contract design and enforcement. I argue that Williamson's ‘process orientation’ – in which the main dimension along which contracts vary is the extent to which contract adjustments are effected through court ordering versus private ordering – provides alternative interpretations of some conventional contract terms but also sheds light on some otherwise puzzling contractual phenomena.

We owe Williamson for the formal introduction of hybrid organizations as essential building blocks in ‘the institutional structure of production’. The analysis of these institutional arrangements, which culminated in The Mechanisms of Governance, provided a unified approach to the variety of setting within which transactions are embedded, opening a new perspective on a cornerstone of modern economies. This essay explores the past, present, and future of this breakthrough. First, it reviews the progressive integration of hybrids as a category of their own in the classic ‘make-or-buy’ model, inserting hybrids as an ‘intermediate’ form different from markets in that adaptation cannot be done unilaterally and different from ‘unified organizations’ in that adaptation cannot be done by fiat. Second, it shows how this initial characterization of hybrids, besides providing a coherent approach to empirical research available at the time, gave a powerful impulse to new contributions, identifying more rigorously the fundamental features of hybrids, throwing light on why firms go hybrid, and explicating the governance structure chosen. Last, it offers insights on a research program that remains a work in progress, delineating new terrains to explore and new puzzles to solve.

Electric power sectors around the world have changed dramatically in the last 25 years as a result of sector liberalization policies. Many electricity sectors are now pursuing deep decarbonization goals which will entail replacing dispatchable fossil generation primarily with intermittent renewable generation (wind and solar) over the next 20–30 years. This transition creates new challenges for both short-term wholesale market design and investment incentives consistent with achieving both decarbonization commitments and security of supply criteria. Thinking broadly about the options for institutional change from a Williamsonian perspective – thinking like Williamson – provides a useful framework for examining institutional adaptation. Hybrid markets that combine ‘competition for the market’ that relies on competitive procurement for long-term purchased power agreements with wind, solar, and storage developers, ideally in a technology neutral fashion, and ‘competition in the market’ that relies on short-term markets designed to produce efficient and reliable operations of intermittent generation and storage, is identified as a promising direction for institutional adaptation. Many auction, contract, and market integration issues remain to be resolved.