Archive for 28 March 2008
Mizzou J-School Centenary
| Peter Klein |
My colleague Steve Weinberg‘s new book on John D. Rockefeller and Ida Tarbell, Taking on the Trust, is reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal. You can read an exerpt here (may be gated for non-subscribers). Steve has another new book, A Journalism of Humanity: A Candid History of the World’s First Journalism School, about the University of Missouri’s J-School, which is celebrating its centenary this year. As explained in the book the journalism school, like the first programs in business administration at Wharton, Tuck, HBS, and elsewhere, struggled to gain acceptance as a legitimate academic program and to escape the “trade-school” stigma.
While vocational programs in law and medicine have long been accepted as legitimate parts of the Academy, and engineering, agriculture, and architecture have been welcomed since at least the late 19th century (in the US, after the Morrill Act), business and journalism have faced particular difficulties becoming integrated into the academic mainstream. Actually, journalism today is even more of an outsider than business administration; for example, while many B-school faculty hold PhDs in economics, sociology, psychology, or other “traditional” disciplines, many J-school professors do not hold PhDs at all, with most being former industry professionals, more like B-school clinical professors. Those of you interested in the history and current problems of business schools might learn something from the experiences of journalism and other professional schools.
The Make-or-Buy Decision: Corporate Lawyer Edition
| Peter Klein |
What are our Lawyers made of?
What are our Lawyers made of?
Of Causes and fees, demurrers and pleas,
Learned Brother and lots of pother,
Counsel and jury with very wise looks,
Flaw in the indictment and statue books,
Such are our Lawyers made of,
Such are our Lawyers made of.
That’s one answer. It ain’t sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s for sure. Whatever lawyers are made of, should firms make them in-house, or hire ones made by somebody else? Steven Schwarcz addresses this question in a new paper, “To Make or to Buy: In-House Lawyering and Value Creation” (Journal of Corporation Law, Winter 2008). Schwarcz notes that large firms have been shifting much of their transactional work from outside law firms to in-house lawyers. Analysis of survey data suggests that information costs and scale and scope economies are the most important drivers of this trend. Asset specificity seems to play a less important role, mainly because reputation effects are sufficient to mitigate opportunistic behavior by outside law firms. A very interesting paper on the make-or-buy decision.
Organizations and Markets 
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