The firm as a temporary concentration is the model’s reconception of the corporation, and perhaps its deepest departure from industrial assumptions. Rather than a quasi-permanent entity whose natural goal is endless self-expansion, a firm is seen as a structured concentration of resources, people, technology, and jurisdiction assembled to perform particular functions. That reframing supplies a governing question:
Is this concentration still useful? If so, continue. If the function is complete or better forms emerge, the resources can move elsewhere.
Corporations become less ontologically sacred — ecological structures, not organisms entitled to survival at all costs. This does not abolish the firm or forbid it from lasting; a concentration that keeps performing a genuinely useful function may persist indefinitely. But it removes survival of the concentration as an end in itself, which is what lets resources, people, and capacity recirculate when a form has outlived its usefulness — the releasing of trapped capacity applied to the firm. It also bounds the firm’s claims on its participants: a temporary concentration assembled for a function does not own the identities, futures, or interior lives of the people who join it. See The Generative Firm.