Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) promotes the alignment of structure of governance and transactions’ characteristics. This alignment is associated with higher performances. Indeed, the traditional TCE considers that actors may choose between several pure forms of governance to economize both on their production and transaction costs. These structures encompass market, hierarchy, network and bazaar, and they display respective strengths and weaknesses in terms of incentives and control. However, as underlined by numerous authors, the reality of governance structures shows that actors opt generally for mixed forms to govern their transactions. Thus, the aim of this paper is to address this puzzling reality and to search theoretically for rationales explaining the preferences towards mixed forms. Several explanations are reviewed. The traditional one in TCE consists in considering that mixed forms enables to remain efficient. Indeed, by taking characteristics from different forms, the mixed forms allow actors to counterbalance some weaknesses by the strengths of other structures in terms of incentives and control intensity. In this paper, we contend a different view of the rationale for mixed forms, adopting a strategic choice approach and arguing that governance structures depend eventually on contingent factors such as the characteristics of the transactions but also on the preferences of actors. Introducing preferences enable to propose a strategizing view in which actors try to reach strategic goals by introducing selected characteristics of other structures giving birth to the mixed forms. The contributions of this paper concern both economics of governance and strategy. Firstly, we try to introduce strategic goals and value creation in the economics of governance without relaxing the assumption of search for efficiency. In a nutshell, we try to reconcile strategizing and economizing logics but distinguish them clearly as the second is contingent when the first is not. By this, we reintroduce the intentionality of actors in a theoretical field where only calculus prevail. Secondly, by abandoning the ideal typical line of reasoning promoted by Williamson and embodied in pure forms, we find more fruitful to think about organizational forms as mixes of pure forms and we provide illustrations for each of these cases we find in the literature. Thirdly, we consider that the governance structures equip the actors to reach their goals and constitute the matrix for the capabilities of the firm. We conceived of this article as a first step to propose a strategic theory of the firm, namely “the capabilities of governance structure”. A refreshing consequence of our framework is that making strategy consists finally in choosing between several strategic goals and implementing the most efficient governance structures to attain these goals.
