Résumé

It is usually acknowledged that the role of the State is crucial for overcoming a major economic crisis, but the role of the firms in coping with economic recessions, their contribution to finding a way out of the crisis are rarely acknowledged in economic theory and history. The aim of this article, based on researches about 20th century Switzerland, is to show that the microperspective can lead to important insights into the puzzling and disturbing discontinuities of macro-economic development. Major economic crises are not understood as market or government failures or caused by some unpredictable events. Instead, endogenous causal factors are stressed, by placing the co-ordinating mechanism of market economies at centre stage. Firms should be viewed as governance systems with a major impact on the functioning of the economy, because they initiate and coordinate economic activities. As governance systems, firms are not just players (in the sense of neo-institutional economics), they are also rule and routine setters and have considerable impact on the path of economic development.