Author Archive
Strategic Management Society Meetings
| Nicolai Foss |
I am currently in beautiful Wien for the Strategic Management Society Meetings. Beforehand I had decided that this would be the test case: Should I continue paying those exorbitant conference fees and expensive hotels for a mediocre conference, or should I just forget about it?
While the pre-conference sessions yesterday were a bit of a disappointment (too many presentations apparently improvised on the trans-Atlantic flight), I must say that I have only attended excellent paper sessions today (Monday). So far the conference is far superior to last year’s conference in Orlando (and the food is better).
Europeans constitute the majority of the participants, but that hasn’t harmed paper quality at all (on the contrary?). The days where the quality gap in strategic management between the US and Europe was huge and pronounced may be over. The Euro research community in strategic management is really shaping up (largely as a result of interaction with US research and import of US research methodology). Bottom line: I will probably give the SMS meetings a shot next year as well!
New Perspectives on Political Economy
| Nicolai Foss |
New Perspectives on Political Economy is a Prague-based journal, edited by Josef Sima and Dan Stastny of the University of Economics in Prague. It is now in its second year of existence. It is a much like a mix of the Journal of Libertarian Studies and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. All issues/articles can be downloaded here. Here is the list of contents of the most recent issue: (more…)
Pomo Periscope IV: A Rothbard Classic
| Nicolai Foss |
Pomo had no greater enemy than the late Murray Rothbard. Here is a hilarious comment on “the hermeneutical invasion of philosophy and economics,” which was originally published in 1989 in the Review of Austrian Economics (and published a bit later in Danish translation by yours truly in the rather short-lived Danish Austrian economics journal, Praxeologica). (more…)
Pomo Periscope III: From Sex and the City to Spengler
| Nicolai Foss |
Although it lies somewhat outside the scope of the Pomo Periscope (cf. this and this), Steven LaTulippe has an interesting commentary, “Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World,” at LewRockwell.com that simultaneously blasts post-modernism and defends cultural conservatism, while reaching from “Sex and the City” (here is another great blasting of that show) to Oswald Spengler. It is a bit like “Scruton light.” (more…)
What’s So Great About Tacit Knowledge? — Cont’d
| Nicolai Foss |
Peter asks, “what’s so great about tacit knowledge?”, pointing out that there is a tendency in the KM literature (and, I may add, parts of the strategic management literature as well) to exalt tacit above explicit knowledge. He correctly points out that tacit knowledge may well be errorneous, to which it may be added that errorneous tacit knowledge is usually more of a problem than errorneous explicit knowledge, since the latter is presumably easier to correct. In a comment on Peter’s post, JC Spender points out that “for the most part the discussion of tacit knowledge is sheer obscurantism.”
I agree with both Peter and JC. But I may want to be even more radical, and ask “What’s — analytically speaking — so great about tacit knowledge?” (more…)
Motivation Workshop at CBS
| Nicolai Foss |
Today the unit that I direct at Copenhagen Business School, The Center for Strategic Management and Globalization, arranged a well-attended “Workshop on the Motivational Foundations of Knowledge Sharing.” The workshop was part of a major research project that we run at the Center, the FOKS project (i.e., Foundations of Knowledge Sharing: Behaviors and Governance). It was organized by my very able PhD student, Mia Reinholt.
We were lucky to have two of the most profound thinkers on motivation in psychology and economics giving keynote speeches, namely Edward Deci and Bruno Frey. (more…)
Coordination (Games) in Organizations
| Nicolai Foss |
The basic thrust of new institutional economics and contract-theory approaches to organizations and contracts is to conceptualize virtually any issue related to economic organization in terms of solving incentive conflicts. The motivation for this presumably is an underlying argument that in the absence of such conflicts, the first-best can be reached without major obstacles. (more…)
Pomo Periscope II: Recommended Reading
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is an old but excellent paper by the great French sociologist Raymond Boudon, “The Freudian-Marxian-Structuralist (FMS) movement in France: variations on a theme by Sherry Turkle,” Revue Tocqueville, vol. II, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 5-24. (Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t seem to exist online, but your library should be capable of getting it for you). The paper is highly recommended, not only for its dissection of the FMS, but also because so much of what says about the FMS fits more contemporary pomo trends perfectly. (more…)
Knowledge Governance: Call for Papers
| Nicolai Foss |
My co-blogger recently blogged (here) on the newly launched International Journal of Strategic Change Management which has a heavy O&M representation (i.e., Peter, I and former O&M guest blogger Joe Mahoney) on its editorial board . As Peter mentioned, Oliver Williamson has just joined IJSCM as consulting editor.
Joe Mahoney, I and the editor of IJSCM, Patricia Ordonez de Pablos, will edit a special issue of IJSCM on “Knowledge Governance.” (For an attempt to characterize knowledge governance as an emerging field in management, see this paper; forthcoming in a slightly revised version in Organization).
Here is the Call for Papers: (more…)
Pomo Periscope I: “Economics and Narrative Form”
| Nicolai Foss |
Here at O&M we try to keep a keen eye on pomo tendencies in economics and management (e.g., here, here and here). Indeed, we do this with such frequency that we, as of this post, will have a regularly occurring feature — The Pomo Periscope.
We kick off by letting the Periscope zoom in on a “Call for Papers on Proposed Panel on Economics and Narrative Form, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, Georgetown, 03/07.” Here is the full call: (more…)
Workshop on Evolution and Policy
| Nicolai Foss |
In an earlier post, I pointed out that evolutionary economics is remarkably weak when it comes to the normative foundations of the EE enterprise. Thus, evolutionary economists do not shy away from making often strong pronouncements on policy, for example, on IPR policy, regional policies, etc., but these policy statements are seldom defended by references to explicit welfare standards.
There are signs that a recognition is spreading that the normative foundations of policy is a weak spot in evolutionary economics. Here is an announcement of an interesting workshop (I may go myself) on “normative policy implications from recent advances in the economics of innovation and industrial dynamics” (what a sexy title!): (more…)
Factions in Evolutionary Economics
| Nicolai Foss |
Evolutionary economics has emerged as the perhaps most successful modern heterodox approach. One possible reason for this relative success is that modern EE, in contrast to Austrian economics, old institutional economics, and (partly) post Keynesian economics, embraces formal model building and econometrics. Like the so-called orthodox economics that modern EE is a self-styled alternative to, EE is by no means monolithic. Although evolutionary economists go (roughly) to the same conferences and publish in pretty much the same journals, several factions are discernible within the overall EE community — such as
- the”Italo-Wharton-Columbia” faction (Dosi, Marengo, Malerba, Orsenigo, Levinthal, Winter, Nelson);
- the “old institutionalist-realist-evolutionists” (Hodgson, Lawson), mainly located in UK and US, and strong in economic geography; and
- the German evolutionists, nowadays primarily represented by Ulrich Witt, the Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Ökonomik in Jena.
One thing that differentiates the the third group from the two other ones is a stronger commitment to methodological individualism (at least the second group seems to explicitly reject MI). The overriding emphasis on routines and habits that characterizes groups 1) and 2) cannot be found in the works of the German evolutionists. Entrepreneurship is much more strongly emphasized here. There is a suspicion of biological analogies. Economic evolution is conceptualized in terms of the emergence and dissemination of novelty, rather than in terms of the evolutionary triad of variation, heredity and selection. It is an approach that is closer to Austrian economics; hence, here at O&M, we are sympathetic to German evolutionism. For a nice sampling, check out the Papers on Economics and Evolution series that is published by the MPI in Jena.
Happy Foss-hmmmm-Crowley Day
| Nicolai Foss |
We bloggers are a narcissistic bunch. My co-blogger has started a tradition of wishing our readers “Happy Hayek-Klein Day ” on his birthday, and obviously I wish to start a similar tradition. Unfortunately, no famous Austrian economists were born on October 12. The closest we can get is the granting of the Ph.D. to Murray Rothbard, but that was Oct. 11 (1956).
I am afraid the perhaps most famous person with an intellectual occupation born on 12 October is . . . the notorious Aleister Crowley (b. 1875), “The Great Beast 666,” “The Wickedest Man in the World,” a libertine rather than a libertarian — and the grandfather of George W. Bush (at least according to this blog).
How I will celebrate? Well, I have a nice 4-hours lecture on transaction cost economics to deliver. Such joy . . .
Jon Elster Site
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is a nice site dedicated to Norwegian sociologist, the Robert Merton Professor at Columbia University, Jon Elster, a champion of an interesting (modified) rational choice and clearly methodological individualist sociology. It lists all Elster’s works, including some unpublished papers. Some works are downloadable. Unfortunately, nothing seems to have been done on the site since appr. 2000.
Forgotten/Overlooked Pioneers of the RBV
| Nicolai Foss |
Pointing to intellectual precursors is an important rhetorical exercise in many fields and disciplines. There may be rational reasons for this practice. Perhaps it helps build identity and assists group cohesion, and other things that we know very little about at O&M. Of course, to some people (including this blogger), doctrinal history is inherently interesting, but people with this preference seem to be a small and vanishing minority (in all of social science; I doubt anyone in natural science does doctrinal history professionally). To the extent that doctrinal history issues enter management discourse, it seems to mainly serve a legitimizing purpose.
When strategy management scholars of the resource-based variety ponder the past of their approach one name invariable comes up, namely that of Edith Tilton Penrose who has acquired the status of pioneering matriarch of the RBV. Numerous papers have been written on Penrose as a precursor of the RBV (e.g., this, this, and this).
Although I have the greatest admiration for Penrose’s work, particularly her 1959 book, I have some difficulties with this interpretation. (more…)
Great Online Langlois Slides for Org Econ Course
| Nicolai Foss |
Former O&M guest blogger Dick Langlois has posted the slides for his Economics of Organization course online here. There are 237 slides in total. Some of them are composed with considerable artistic acumen (e.g., check out slide #189). Even better than those excellent slides on the same subject I have seen from the hand of my esteemed co-blogger.
Bill Starbuck’s New Book
| Nicolai Foss |
Omar at orgtheory.net dismisses critical discussions of the institutions of publishing social science research as “jeremiads” (see here), that is, “moralistic texts that denounce a society for its wickedness” (Wikipedia), typically written — but by no means always — by old, grumpy men. In contrast, Omar has great faith in the efficiency of these institutions (see the exchanges between my co-blogger and Omar here).
Although Bill Starbuck isn’t young any more, and there no doubt is a certain jeremiad-like quality to his misgivings about research practice in the social sciences, I submit that even Omar stands to benefit from reading Starbuck’s new opus, The Production of Knowledge: The Challenge of Social Science Research. Clearly, Omar has considerable experience with the institutions of publishing, and Bill Starbuck has only been the editor of Administrative Science Quarterly, but there may still be a thing or two to learn. Here is the book’s blurb: (more…)
HRM in Heaven and Hell
| Nicolai Foss |
This is definitely ephemera, but I thought it was funny:
One day while walking down the street a highly successful HR Director was tragically hit by a bus and she died. Her soul arrived in heaven where she was met at the Pearly Gates by St. Peter himself.
“Welcome to Heaven,” said St. Peter. “Before you get settled in though, it seems we have a problem. You see, strangely enough, we’ve never once had a Human Resources Director make it this far and we’re not really sure what to do with you.” (more…)
Beauty and Politics
| Nicolai Foss |
Most of us classical liberals tend to think of politics as largely ugly. But apparently beauty is more important in politics than competence, intelligence, likability, or trustworthiness (not that it is surprising that these may not be that important ….). Check this fascinating new paper.
Reflexivity Bleg
| Nicolai Foss |
While we can all agree that ideas matter, how much do they matter? Is much, and perhaps most, of social reality essentially bootstrap phenomena in which the Thomas Theorem (i.e., the “the situations that men define as true, become true for them”) holds true? Do the social sciences bootstrap much of social reality in the sense that social science decisively affects the agents that social scientists study? Or, are there constants, stable mechanisms, etc. that exist and work regardless of what social scientists believe about them (as, I suppose, many economists would hold)?
The idea that theorizing affects the objects of theorizing — that is, the notion of “reflexivity” — has been an important one in sociology for a long time (Thomas wrote about it in the 1920s; Merton in the 1940s). It has become a Leitmotiv in the sociology of knowledge. It has also been a recurring theme in economics (in connection with predictions and the modeling of expectations; e.g., the debate surrounding the Lucas critique), and it has been treated by philosophers as well (e.g. Popper). However, this literature has not discussed the extent to which reflexivity (in the above sense) obtains.
The issue is obviously very difficult to get a hold on. However, I also believe it is a crucial one, particularly in management where we have recently witnessed people essentially arguing that economics-as-applied to management is (nothing but?) a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., this paper). So, do any of our readers know of literature that can help to frame and answer the questions with which this bleg began?
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