Transaction cost economics explains organizations in a market vs. hierarchy dichotomy. In this view, complex real-world coordination forms are simply considered hybrids of those pure and ideal forms. This organizational dichotomy is mainly based on relative marginal transaction costs and rational choice of coordination form. The present paper, in contrast, argues that pure market and hierarchy, including their potential formal hybrids, are an empirically void set. Coordination forms, it is argued, have to be conceptualized in a fundamentally different way. A relevant organizational space must reflect the dimensions of a complex world such as dilemma-prone direct interdependence, resulting in strong strategic uncertainty, mutual externalities, collectivities, and subsequent emergent process. This, in turn, will lead either to (1) informally institutionalized, problem-solving cooperation (the dominant instrumental dimension of institutionalization) or (2) mutual blockage, lock-in on an inferior path, and power and status-based market and hierarchy failure (the dominant ceremonial dimension of the institution). This paper establishes emergent (instrumental) institutionalized cooperation as a genuine organizational dimension which generates a third ‘attractor' in the new organizational space besides ‘market' and ‘hierarchy', namely the informal ‘network'. In this way, an organizational triangle can be constructed which may serve as a more realistic heuristic device for empirical organizational research. Its ideal corners and some ideal hybrids on its edges still remain empirically void, but its inner space becomes empirically relevant and accessible. The Organizational Triangle is tentatively applied, by way of a set of criteria for instrumental problem-solving, corresponding survey questions, and a simple formal algorithm, to the cases of the supplier network of ‘DaimlerChrysler US International' at Tuscaloosa, AL, to the open-source network Linux, and the web-platforms Wikipedia and ‘Open-Source Car'. It is considered to properly reflect what is generally theorized in evolutionary-institutional economics of coordination and the firm and might offer some insight for the topical reconstructions of the car and other industries to come
