The firm in the Information Age: organizational responses to technological change in the processed foods sector

The transformation of production processes that occurred across a range of manufacturing industries during the Industrial Age generated new and more complex requirements for the process of intermediation as well as for the production systems themselves. The development of hierarchical organizations provided firms with the ability to oversee directly many of these new tasks and to create markets that supported them. In contrast, the advent of the information Age has tended not so much to require the creation of markets de nova but has rather altered the nature of existing relationships of intermediation in ways that have facilitated a much wider collection of organizational forms.