Did the crafts and guilds actually build a foundation for formal business and social organizations? This also is very likely.

And indeed, isn't it germane to explore what the growth, development and ultimate sophistication of medieval crafts and guilds may have led to?

In the interest of the big picture, this paper looks now at that pivotal point through an interesting, lengthy article written ten years before Rosser's piece, Alfred Kieser (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1989) takes the history of guilds and places it in a big-picture setting, far more theoretical and philosophical that Rosser would do - albeit Rosser's attention to detail provides a wonderfully rich picture of England - and how the English lived and worked during the medieval period. Kieser asserts that "medieval guilds were not yet formal organizations but formed important predecessor institutions in the evolutionary process that led to the emergence of organizations." Why is this...
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