Search Results for ‘microfoundations or "micro-foundations"’
Felin and Foss Best Paper Award
| Peter Klein |
Congratulations to Nicolai and Teppo Felin for winning this year’s SO!WHAT Award for Scholarly Contribution for their 2005 paper “Strategic Organization: A Field in Search of Micro-Foundations” (ungated version). These are given by the journal Strategic Organization for the best paper published five years earlier (i.e., after some seasoning, based on impact as well as substance and originality). Look here (about half-way down the page) for praise from Jay Barney and Bruce Kogut. Way to go, guys!
Here are some prior O&M posts on microfoundations.
7 comments 2 January 2010
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of JMS: “Micro-Level Origins of Routines and Capabilities”
| Nicolai Foss |
The micro-foundations theme is gaining increased attention in management research. As a partial reflection of this, please check the Call for Papers below for a SI of the Journal of Management Studies on the topic in the title of this post. Submit a paper! (more…)
Add comment 21 April 2009
Austrian Economics and Strategic Management
| Nicolai Foss |
In terms of direct influence, the impact of Austrian economics (AE) on strategic management is fairly limited (e.g., Jacobson, 1992; Young et al., 1996; Foss et al., 2008). Different kinds of industrial economics, namely the SCP approach, the Chicago-UCLA school, and game theoretical industrial economics, have clearly been stronger influences. However, the points of contact and even overlap between the mainstream of strategic management and AE are many, and AE has the potential to contribute to the further development of the field. (more…)
1 comment 18 March 2009
Relations Between Micro and Macro Levels
| Nicolai Foss |
Levels issues, micro-foundations, methodological individualism and collectivism, etc. have long been O&M favorites (e.g., here, here, here, and here). While the O&M bloggers are card-carrying methodological individualists, we also (like all other economists and management scholars) acknowledge that macro matters, in the sense that it may be meaningful to think of variables placed at macro levels exerting an influence on decisions made at micro variables (as in the Coleman diagram; see here). The question is, what is the nature of this “relation”? (more…)
5 comments 22 February 2009
CBS Microfoundations Conference: Knowledge and HRM
| Nicolai Foss |
As O&M readers may know I am the Director of Copenhagen Business School’s Center for Strategic Management and Globalization. As the name indicates we do SIM (strategic and international management), but with a twist: We are specifically interested in the governance dimensions of knowledge processes (knowledge sharing, integration, creation, etc.), and we are specifically interested in micro-foundations for the firm-level concepts that we routinely apply in strategic management and IB (see here for a more detailed characterization). These two themes come together in a conference organized next week (18-19 September) by Dr. Dana Minbaeva, “HRM, Knowledge Processes, and Organizational Performance: In Search of Micro-Foundations.” The papers are online, and many of them should be of potential interest to readers of O&M. I particularly recommend the paper by Joshua Tomsik, Todd Zenger and Teppo Felin (of orgtheory.net fame), “The Knowledge Economy: Emerging Organizational Forms, Micro-Foundations, and Key Human Resource Heuristics.”
Add comment 12 September 2008
Goals or Preferences?
| Nicolai Foss |
My two favorite sociologists are Peter Abell and Sigwart Lindenberg. Both stress rationality (and rationalism), micro-foundations for social science research, and are (not surprisingly) sympathetic to, even admiring of, economics. However, neither is an uncritical admirer of economics.
In “Why the Microfoundations of the Social Sciences Should be Based on Goals Rather than Preferences” (you can find it on this page), Lindenberg argues that economists tend to conflate preferences and goals, or at least leaves open or trivializes the relationship between the two. (more…)
3 comments 4 June 2007
Arrow on Microfoundations
| Peter Klein |
Michael Greinecker shares this illuminating comment by Kenneth Arrow, quoted in Colander, Holt, and Rosser, ed., The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists, (University of Michigan Press, 2004):
I’ve never understood [macroeconomics]. What I mean by this is that my idea of understanding is having a model that captures what is going on. In macro we don’t have that; instead we have empirical generalization, and those generalizations tend to break down rather quickly. The question is, can you get some understanding of the empirical evidence from the models? One attempt has been to generate empirical work out of very simplistic models- essentialy they are micro models blown up. I don’t give much credence to those models. One of the things that microeconomics teaches you is that individuals are not alike. There is heterogeneity, and probably the most important heterogeneity here is heterogeneity of expectations. If we didn’t have heterogeneity, there would be no trade. But developing an analytic model with heterogenous agents is difficult.
This sounds a lot like our critiques of “macro”-level explanations in organization theory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Macroeconomics, labor economics, and industrial organization have become increasingly “micro” in the last two or three decades. Will organization theory follow, or is the resistance to economics in some quarters strong enough to block the move?
1 comment 9 January 2007
Continuing the Micro-foundations Crusade
| Nicolai Foss |
With Teppo Felin and Peter Abell, I am continuing the crusade for building micro-foundations for management theory that Teppo and I initiated with our editorial essay in Strategic Organization last year ( “Strategic Organization: a Field in Search of Microfoundations"). We have now written the paper, "Building Micro-foundations for the Routines, Capabilities and Performance Links" as a further stride forward in the struggle against macro-mysticism in strategic management and organization theory. Here is the abstract:
Micro-foundations have become an important emerging theme in strategic management. This paper addresses micro-foundations in two related ways. First, we argue that the kind of macro (or “collectivist”) explanation that is utilized in the capabilities view in strategic management –which implies a neglect of micro-foundations –is incomplete. There are no mechanisms that work solely on the macro-level, directly connecting routines through capabilities to firm-level outcomes. While routines and capabilities are useful shorthand for complicated patterns of individual action and interaction, ultimately they are best understood at the micro-level. Second, we provide a formal model that shows precisely why macro explanation is incomplete and which exemplifies how explicit micro-foundations may be built for notions of routines and capabilities and for how these impact firm performance.
Because we may submit to a journal that prohibits uploading of papers while they are under review, reluctantly I must refrain from making the paper downloadable . However, If you would like to get a copy, send me a mail on njf.smg@cbs.dk
Add comment 5 June 2006
