Author Archive
New JC Spender Essay
| Nicolai Foss |
JC Spender is one of my favorite management thinkers. I may disagree with him, but he is usually challenging and very often profound (in contrast to some other management thinkers who have been discussed here at O&M). And he writes extremely well. JC has a new essay coming out in Journal of Management Inquiry, “Management as a Regulated Profession.” (It can also be downloaded from JC’s site). Much of the content of the paper is a discussion and diagnosis of the theory-practice gap, including pointing out that this discussion has been going for a very long time: “Redlich (1957) tells of the 19th-century German steel town that, its business failing, pressed the local business school principal to take charge. The business failed anyway, and he was put in jail — where he died — to ponder the gap between rigor and relevance. Deans beware!” (more…)
Management Journal Impact Factors 2005
| Nicolai Foss |
The 2006 figures aren’t there, but the 2005 ones are out on the Web of Science (SSCI) (you should be able to find these if your library has access to the Web of Science; look under “Journal Citation Reports”). (more…)
Pomo Periscope VIII: Jean Baudrillard “Dies”
| Nicolai Foss |
Apparently, it happened Tuesday last week, but I didn’t notice until this morning: Pomo-thinker Jean Baudrillard has fallen victim to the Keynesian long run (see this). Baudrillard became famous for his notion of hyper-reality, and for his habit of indicating the (media) manufactured nature of events by an extensive use of quotation marks (the most notorious example being the “Gulf War”). He was the author of sentences such as this one: “Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes” (quoted from this classic piece). And here is an example of a profound contribution to political philosophy: “All of our values are simulated,” he told the New York Times in 2005. “What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom.” The problem now is what to make of media reports of his death. A simulated reality?
TCE Workshop in Bergen, 15-16 November 2007
| Nicolai Foss |
In 2004, my colleagues at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, professors Sven Haugland and Svein Ulset, and I organized a “Nordic Workshop on Transaction Cost Economics in Business Administration.” Oliver Williamson and my co-blogger gave keynote speeches. The best papers, including a paper by Williamson, were published in a special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management in 2005.
With Professor Arne Nygaard, Sven Haugland and I now plan a new workshop, no longer “Nordic,” on the application of TCE in business administration. (more…)
ACAC 2007 — Submission Deadline Approaching
| Nicolai Foss |
I have attended only two truly excellent conferences. The first one was the 1997 inaugural conference for the International Society of New Institutional Economics. For me much of the excitement of that conference was seeing Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, Harold Demsetz, Mancur Olson, and other luminaries for the first time. To keep flight costs, my wife and I had to stay for 10 days in St. Louis, but it was worth it ;-)
The second truly excellent conference I have experienced was the 2005 ACAC which had an equally impressive line-up, only from strategic management, (e.g., Jay Barney, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Pankaj Ghemawat, etc.) as well as great papers and discussions. (more…)
Enacting Privatization
| Nicolai Foss |
Here at O&M we have often criticized and poked fun at ideas on social construction and their derived notions in management, such as Weickian “enactment.” Still, it is a fundamental tenet of classical liberalism that ideas matter and matter crucially (although some classical liberals, notably George Stigler, have argued that ideas matter much less than economists would like to think). One crucial area where ideas would seem to have mattered a great deal is privatization (a term that seems to have been invented by Peter Drucker).
In a paper, “Palace Wars and Privatization: Did Chicago Beat Cambridge in Influencing Economic Policies,” just published in the European Management Review, J. Muir McPherson adds to his earlier work with Bruce Kogut (this paper; for a related idea diffusion paper, see this), and examines the influence of “the epistemic community of American-trained economists” (based on the number of non-US, US and Chicago PhD degrees in a given country) on privatization policies. The dataset encompasses self-collected data on 13,422 economists. The statistical methodology is a hazard model. The results indicate a clear impact of the frequency of US-trained economists on the probability of privatization, but it is also noteworthy that among theUS economists, “As Chicago ideas won out . . . the difference between Chicago economics PhDs and graduates from other schools could no longer be detected from the general influence of US-trained economists on the decision to privatize.”
CBS Workshop on Knowledge Sharing
| Nicolai Foss |
The Center for Strategic Management and Globalization hosts a workshop on “The Barriers to Intra- and Inter-firm Knowledge Transfer” at the Copenhagen Business School June 15. Keynote Speeches will be given by Linda Argote and Gabriel Szulanski. Paper proposals must be submitted prior to April 10 to the arranger, Dr. Koen Heimeriks at kh.smg@cbs.dk Here is the Call for Papers.
Demanding the Right to Be Offensive
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is an online campaign to defend unrestricted freedom of inquiry in universities, recently started by Academics for Academic Freedom. Its Statement of Academic Freedom reads:
‘We, the undersigned, believe the following two principles to be the foundation of academic freedom:
(1) that academics, both inside and outside the classroom, have unrestricted liberty to question and test received wisdom and to put forward controversial and unpopular opinions, whether or not these are deemed offensive, and
(2) that academic institutions have no right to curb the exercise of this freedom by members of their staff, or to use it as grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.’
Leo Strauss, the Randian
| Nicolai Foss |
Yes, that’s right . . . well, almost: If you put together the key political ideas of neo-con idol Strauss, “we will arrive at Objectivist Libertarianism.” So says philospher Tibor Machan in the most recent issue of Philosophy Now (an excellent, bi-monthly journal written for, as they used to say, the “intelligent layman”). (more…)
“Lead Papers”?
| Nicolai Foss |
Increasingly often you see the following in the publications section of academic CVs: “paper title, journal, volume, pages (lead paper).” I take it that the “lead paper” is the first paper in an issue. Obviously, the impression that the writer of the CV wants to convey is that somehow this paper is the best in that specific issue (or at least written by the biggest guy). Do any of our readers know whether this is something journal editors (consciously) do? Is having your paper printed as the first paper in an issue a reliable signal of quality? Or is the structuring of papers in an issue a more random thing?
The A..hole Factor in Economics
| Nicolai Foss |
I may be entirely mistaken, but my personal and admittedly casual observations after working in academia since 1989 seem to point toward something like the following approximate generalizations: “Orthodox” (or “mainstream”) economists and finance scholars are — I stress: as a crude approximation — reserved, not very wordy, introverted, but still direct (bordering on brutal, particularly in seminars). They are spiteful of “softies.” On the other hand, “heterodox” (“non-mainstream”) economists (including many management scholars) are generally more extroverted, easier to get along with, and less direct/brutal. However, they are as spiteful of mainstream economics as mainstream economists are of the soft stuff (Marxist economists are, however, a lot like mainstream economists). Again, this is just a tendency; there are many, many counter-examples. Am I right? Or just biased (e.g., by hanging out with too many heterodox types)? (more…)
Spooky CEO Research
| Nicolai Foss |
Research on corporate governance and the importance to value creation of CEOs is becoming increasingly morbid. Check out the abstract of a recent paper by CBS colleague Morten Bennedsen (as the paper doesn’t seem to be online, you will have to write Morten for a copy; mb.eco@cbs.dk):
Estimating the value of top managerial talent is a central topic of research that has attracted widespread attention from academics and practitioners. Yet, studying the impact of managers on firm performance is difficult because of endogeneity and omitted variables concerns. In this paper, we test for the impact of managers on firm performance in two ways. First, we examine whether top executive deaths have an impact on firm performance, focusing on the manager and firm characteristics that are associated to large manager-death effects. Second, we test for the interaction between the personal and professional activities of managers by examining the effect of deaths of immediate family members (spouses, parents, children, etc) on firm performance. Our main findings are three. First, CEO deaths are strongly correlated with declines in firms operating profitability, asset growth and sales growth. Second, the death of board members does not seem to affect firm prospects, indicating that not all senior managers are equally important for firms’ outcomes. Third, CEOs’ immediate family deaths are significantly negatively correlated to firm performance. This last result suggests a strong link between the personal and business roles that top management plays, a connection that is present even in large firms. Overall, our findings demonstrate CEOs are extremely important for firms’ prospects.
Why the Strong May Be Late
| Nicolai Foss |
One of the favorite cases of technology strategy classes is the innovation of the CAT scanner. The first such commercially viable scanner was introduced in 1972 by EMI, by no means a major player in the diagnostic-imaging market. The EMI scanner was leapfrogged by General Electric in 1977. GE dominates the market today along with Siemens. EMI exited already in 1979.
Why was EMI the first to commercialize CAT scanners and not the more established players with the relevant core competencies? Typical explanations of this kind of pattern where strong players avoid pioneering a market involve “stupidity” (because of various biases the strong do not see it coming) or “lock-in” (for various reasons, the strong cannot respond effectively). (more…)
Three Great Austrian Economists in One Book!
| Nicolai Foss |
My co-blogger abundantly possesses that increasingly scarce resource: Modesty. So, I suppose it falls on my shoulders to announce to the blogosphere that the Mises Institute has just published a beautiful new edition of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics with a foreword by Peter. (more…)
Taxi Drivers in Nam
| Nicolai Foss |
It is always lovely to witness our theories come alive. So, here is an illustration of the agency problem for the benefit of our non-American readers (the example will be lost on Americans for reasons that will become clear :-)). A favorite examplification of agency problems are taxis (not Hayekian ones — real ones), because of the complex ownership arrangements of these assets.
When I visited Vietnam in January with my family, the way we got around in the cities was mainly using the private and extremely inexpensive taxis (there is virtually no public transportation in this supposedly commie country). Most other transport options (certainly bikes, “cyclos”, motorbikes, even walking) increase the death risk rather dramatically in the horrendous Vietnamese traffic. (more…)
Nerd Alert!
| Nicolai Foss |
What can possibly be more relevant for an econ-oriented blog than to wax lyrical about calculators? Do you remember Hewlett-Packard’s ill-fated experiments with Reverse Polish Notation? Or their excellent HP 41 model? (We will forget about their wristwatch-calculator.) Did you own a TI-57 and its excellent successors TI-58 and 59? Or, did you have to manage with a crappy TI-30? And what about the super-innovative Casios? Chances are that if you are old enough and are reading this blog, you were part of the great calculator craze of the 1970s and 1980s.
Receiving my first electronic calculator from my grandparents on my 9th birthday in 1973, I acquired a taste for these great gadgets and probably owned around 50 of them from 1973 to 1983 at which point of time I completely lost interest (unlike this über-nerd — who is even German). Those of you who harbor nostalgic memories, check out The Old Calculators Web Museum or the Pocket Calculator Show.
Agreeing With Omar
| Nicolai Foss |
Geoff Hodgson is in many ways an extremely interesting scholar. His work is penetrating, he is extremely widely read, his critique of mainstream economics is often well taken, and he is a lucid writer. However, he (like all of us) entertains at least one heavy idiosyncracy, namely a chronic penchant for picking on the notion of methodological individualism. Some of us think methodological individualism is almost trivially true, but Hodgson certainly wouldn’t agree. Many of his writings contain attacks on MI. A recent issue of Organization Studies contains a major diatribe against MI penned by Hodgson. (more…)
I Do “Simplistic” and “Comical” Work
| Nicolai Foss |
Of course, all of you knew already — but I confess that it came as a bit of a surprise to myself to have my work (rather than my blog posts) with Christian Bjoernskov, “Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurship: Some Cross-country Evidence” (here is an early version and here is a revised Danish version), characterized as “simplistic” and “comical” by the Danish deputy prime minister and the chief economist of the Danish labour unions, respectively. Here is the context. (more…)
Final Call for Papers for the 2007 DRUID Conference
| Nicolai Foss |
The annual conferences of the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (of which this blogger is a founding member) are characterized by their hopeless names and their increasingly high quality level.
This year’s conference on “Appropriability, Proximity, Routines and Innovation” (no less) takes place at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, June 18 at 1 pm to June 20 at 5 pm, 2007. Among the confirmed participants are Allan Afuah, Gautam Ahuja, Keith Aoki, Ron Boschma, Thomas Brenner, Bo Carlsson, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, David Hsu, William Ocasio, Joanne Oxley, Chris May, Orietta Marsili, Anita M. McGahan, Mariko Sakakibara, Olav Sorenson, Michael Storper, Joel West, and Sidney Winter.
To cite from the DRUID site: “In addition to the paper sessions the conference will include plenary panel debates where internationally merited scholars take stands on contemporary issues within the overall conference theme.” One such event is a debate between Peter Abell, Giovanni Dosi, Sidney Winter and yours truly over the issue of whether strategy research needs to become more methodologically individualist.
Deadline for full paper submission: February 28, 2007 (Twelve noon, Pacific time (GMT -8). See instructions for submission at the conference site.
Knowledge Governance Primer
| Nicolai Foss |
Along with Euro colleagues such as Prof. Anna Grandori (Bocconi University) and my colleagues at the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization here at the Copenhagen Business School I have championed the notion of “knowledge governance” as a distinct perspective on knowledge management that explicitly relies on “rational” organization theory (including organizational economics), is methodologically individualist, etc. (more…)
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