Archive for 28 November 2008
Micro-Foundations at the Rotterdam School of Management
| Nicolai Foss |
We have blogged extensively on “micro-foundations” here on O&M (particularly in those Golden Days of O&M when the present blogger was more active). The micro-foundations theme seems to be gaining a lot of ground in management recently. About two years ago I had a paper on the subject rejected from a leading management journal because the reviewers and the editor argued that the micro-foundations theme was essentially non-controversial and scholars handled it in a pragmatic manner — i.e., there was no need to raise it as an issue. That same editor, I hear, is now actively talking about the pressing need for micro-foundations in management ;-) This reflects an increasingly widespread discourse on the subject. At the recent Strategic Management Society Conference in Köln micro-foundations were explicitly discussed in several of the PDWs, in David Teece’s keynote speech, in the keynote panel that I participated in, and in lots of paper sessions.
The work of Teppo Felin and I on the micro-foundations issue (e.g., here) has been particularly taken up with the lack of clear micro-foundations in the dominant capabilities view of the firm and strategy. Back in 2005 Teppo and I organized a two-days conference in Copenhagen on the subject. Koen Heimeriks, then an Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School, is organizing something like a follow-up conference at the Rotterdam School of Management where he is now an Assistant Professor. Keynote speakers are Sid Winter, Maurizio Zollo, and yours truly. Here is the homepage for Koen’s conference. Koen is a very good and meticulous conference organizer, the subject is inherently interesting, so please submit a paper!
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