Author Archive
Professors Respond to Incentives
| Nicolai Foss |
That’s the overall conclusion of a nice recent study, “Career Incentives and ‘Publish and Perish’ in German and US Universities,” by Uschi Backes-Gellner and Axel Schlinghof. Their theoretical basis is fairly standard personnel economics, but empirically they do something attractive, namely they compae intra-individual productivity differences and monetary incentives over a single researcher’s career. This means that they can avoid the biases introduced by inter-individual ability differences that plague cross-sectional comparisons of research productivity and incentives.
Briefly, Backes-Gellner and Schlinghof hypothesize that increases in research output will obtain prior to tenure in the US system as well as prior to lifetime employment in Germany (and a decline after tenure/lifetime employment). They expect productivity to rise more prior to promotion to full professor in the US than prior to equivalent career changes in Germany (because the wage structure is more compressed in German academia). Finally, for the US (but not for Germany), they expect research productivity to increase in the period before promotion to full professor, but decline afterwards. To test the hypotheses, the authors build a dataset from online CVs of US and German researchers. All hypotheses are borne out in the data.
The Emerging Strategic Entrepreneurship Field
| Nicolai Foss |
“Strategic entrepreneurship” has emerged as a field in the intersection of strategic management and entrepreneurship. It has its own specialized journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, now in its fifth year of existence. Some of the pioneers of strategic entrepreneurship characterize the field in the following manner:
Strategic entrepreneurship is the integration of entrepreneurial (i.e., opportunity-seeking actions) and strategic (i.e., advantage-seeking actions) perspectives to design and implement entrepreneurial strategies that create wealth. Thus, strategic entrepreneurship is entrepreneurial action that is taken with a strategic perspective” ( Hitt, Ireland, Camp & Sexton, 2002:2).
I am excited by this research stream and think that its attempt to identify the antecedents of new value creation in the context of established firms is entirely warranted (at least in management research, entrepreneurship has too often been associated solely with new firm formation). And yet, strategic entrepreneurship is clearly a field in search of a core and an identity.
It is not yet entirely clear whether the field amounts to more than relabelling existing “dynamic” strategic management ideas (e.g., dynamic capabilities, real options), ideas that have been around in entrepreneurship research for some time (e.g., entrepreneurial orientation), and ideas from innovation theory. It is also not clear what fundamental view of the firm is underlying this research. Given that extant entrepreneurship has had a strong emphasis on individuals, it is striking that individuals do not really seem to be present in strategic entrepreneurship research. It is not made clear, or even discussed, what role organization design (the design of organizational structure and control) plays for the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities.
The Center (soon Department) of Strategic Management and Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School has arranged a conference that is dedicated to furthering strategic entrepreneurship by “bringing organization design and micro-foundations into the field.” The conference begins tomorrow and features such luminaries as Shaker Zahra, Jeff Hornsby, Bill Schulze and Mike Wright — and O&M’s Peter Klein. More to come …
Do Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurship Impact Total Factor Productivity?
| Nicolai Foss |
Cross-country studies of the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurship have become something of a cottage industry. My contribution to the industry is an earlier paper with Christian Bjørnskov, as well as rather recent one, also written with Christian, “Do Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurship Impact Total Factor Productivity?” (and we have a third paper in the works with a certain Klein).
In the former paper we analyzed institutions and economic policies as determinants of entrepreneurship, paying particular attention to “freedom variables,” like sound money and a stable legal framework. In the latter paper, we focus on where the action is in the growth process, namely Total Factor Productivity, and proffer Austro-institutional arguments why entrepreneurship and the institutions associated with a free society may be expected to positively impact TFP.
While we find that entrepreneurship strongly and significantly impacts TFP, our results only partially support the intuition that institutions of liberty as well as liberal economic policies promote growth in productivity. In fact, we find no significant effects of sound money and legal quality on TFP in the medium run. When some of the freedom variables are interacted with the entrepreneurship variable, we in fact find that entrepreneurial activity is more effective in raising levels of TFP in environments dominated or strongly influenced by government activity, either through production in government-owned enterprises and investments or in its financing activities. Thus, increasing the active involvement of the government in the economy as well as the tax burden actually increases the impact of entrepreneurship on TFP. Our explanation of this somewhat surprising finding is that a reduced supply of entrepreneurship increases the marginal productivity of entrepreneurship; thus, the best ideas do survive even in the relatively hostile welfare state environment. (more…)
The Vromen/Abell-Felin-Foss Debate
| Nicolai Foss |
As readers of this blog will know (probably ad nauseam), Teppo Felin and I have been engaged over the last five years or so in a minor crusade in favor of building micro-foundations for, particularly, strategic management research (e.g., this paper with Peter Abell). I think it is fair to say that we have had some success with this project, as talk of micro-foundations has now become a part of contemporary strategic management discourse.
One of our critical targets have been the extant literature on capabilities and routines which we argue work with collective-level constructs that have no clear micro-foundations. We make use of the famous Coleman “bathtub” diagram to explicate these ideas.
In a paper, “Micro-foundations in strategic management: Squaring Coleman’s diagram,” that just been published online in Erkenntnis, Jack Vromen, criticizes our reading of the routines and capabilities literature and, in particular, our use of the Coleman diagram to explicate our criticism. Basically, he argues that we are confused about the key distinction between constitutive and causal relations. Here is our Reply. The abstracts are copied in below. (more…)
Austrian Economics in Transition
| Nicolai Foss |
The Austrian School of Economics continues to provide grist for the doctrinal historian’s mill. New interpretations are developed. Forgotten manuscripts by prominent Austrians are still being discovered. The discovery of the Mises archive about a decade ago by Jörg Guido Hülsmann comes to mind. I recently had the pleasure of reading four hitherto unpublished Hayek papers (including his talk at Cambridge in 1931, immediately before the lectures at LSE that became Prices and Production, that Joan Robinson later described/dissed in this manner, referring to a question by Richard Kahn: “Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat that would increase unemployment?” “Yes,” said Hayek, “but,” pointing to his triangles on the board, “it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why”).
Many of those who have done important work on the history of the school includes committed contemporary Austrians (e.g., Joe Salerno, Roger Garrison, Richard Ebeling, etc.), but very substantial research has also been contributed by economists who may may not consider themselves Austrians (this includes many European scholars, such as Hansjoerg Klausinger, Meghnad Desai, Rudy van Zijp, Jacb Birner and many others). This evening I had the opportunity to browse Austrian Economics in Transition, which is an example of this kind of doctrinal history scholarship. The book is edited by Harald Hagemann, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Yukihiro Ikeda, and was published a couple of months ago by Palgrave MacMillan. It is a collection of essays, 16 in total, by European and Japanese scholar, originating from a conference on Menger in Japan in 2004, and addressing the history of the Austrian School until approximately the end of World War II. (more…)
RBV Primer
| Nicolai Foss |
With Nils Stieglitz I have written “Modern Resource-Based Theory(ies)” (creative title, eh?) for the Handbook on the Economics and Theory of the Firm (apparently, “economics” and “theory” are different things), edited by Michael Dietrich and Jackie Krafft (Edward Elgar, 2011). The paper is mainly an overview. However, we also argue that there are many indications that the different strands of the RBV are increasingly converging.
In Defence of L’Ancien Regime
| Nicolai Foss |
It is sometimes instructive to reflect on the massive changes that the University has undergone since the Second World War. On the negative side, the advent of the mass university has very likely led to a dumbing down of the curriculum in many disciplines and a fall in the requirements for entry. It has paved the way for a powerful bureaucratic caste, and the “bureaucrat-professor” who is in the academic industry because of his specialized management skill, and not because of his wish to engage in scholarly pursuits and the training of the most intelligent persons in a given society. On the benefit side, many more people can now share in science and general learning, very likely contributing to economic growth.
As the universities are broadly speaking financed by the taxpayer, politicians and their henchmen in the ministeries of education, science, technology, etc. happily undertake to steer the universities. Thus, inspired by as-yet-largely-unvalidated claims of a general shift in the “mode of knowledge production,” university bureaucrats, managers, and politicians are calling for increased “inter-disciplinarity” and “relevance,” notably in the form of mobilizing multiple disciplines in the context of concrete problem-solving in “business” (the so-called “Mode II”). In the context of business schools, it seems almost de rigeur in certain quarters to deem business schools largely “irrelevant” (meanwhile, business happily employs the products of business schools, paying MBA and other graduates hefty salaries, presumably motivated by the high usefulness, indeed, “relevance,” of these graduates).
Contrast all this with universities not so many decades back. There are not many who stand up on behalf of l’ancien regime of universities. But here are two who do, one implicitly and the other one (much) more explicitly. (more…)
ScienceCodex
| Nicolai Foss |
ScienceCodex is the name of a great resource for serious procrastination, amusement, and — sometimes — useful inputs to research and teaching. Signing up for the feed will result in about 20 daily pieces of science news, and, at least for me, a couple of them are usually great fun and potentially useful for teaching. For example, those who teach OB or HRM may find this piece, “Over 50? You probably prefer negative stories about young people,” useful for classroom discussion. There are also potentially offensive stories (e.g., “You Kick Like a Girl“), so be forewarned ;-)
The Economics of Freedom of Speech
| Nicolai Foss |
Recent, uhhmm, debate here on O&M has made me wonder why we don’t have an economics of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech has been hailed as the fundamental hallmark of free, open societies and a fundamental human right. It is also clear that freedom of speech is under attack, not just by its traditional enemies within various fundamentalist factions of established religions and authoritarian, populist, and socialist/communist regimes, but also by the tendency to turn political disagreements into moral disagreements (in Europe, most prevalent among lefties who just don’t disagree with you but think you are downright evil in case you defend free markets, nuclear power, etc.).
Related to the latter point, increasingly individuals, groups, and nations define certain opinions, political positions, moral judgments, etc. as “hatecrimes.” This position seems increasingly influential in the EU. Proponents of the right to freedom of speech has countered that part of living in a free and open society is that there is simply no right to avoid insults, hurt feelings, and the like. For example, such arguments have been invoked here in Denmark in the aftermath of the Mohammed cartoon crisis, and are currently being leveled against DK legislation regulating blasphemous utterances. However, even the most ardent defenders of freedom of speech draw the line at the explicit verbal promotion of violence against others. And most defenders of freedom of speech would also argue that organizations and associations have the rights to regulate their members’ freedom of speech.
These are clearly externality and property rights issues, and would therefore seem to fall directly within the orbit of economic arguments. And yet, economists have had very little to say about freedom of speech. Specifically, negative or positive externalities are not conventionally seen as including the untraded effects of utterances. One of the few papers that have dealt with these issues, Coase’s “The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas,” basically argues that if there is a case for regulating the market for goods, there is also a case for regulating the market for ideas (specifically, politicians — which admittedly adds to the attraction of the idea). (more…)
Chris Freeman, 1921-2010
| Nicolai Foss |
Chris Freeman, author of The Economics of Industrial Innovation, co-founder of Research Policy, and founder and first director of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, died yesterday. Freeman was not only an academic entrepreneur, but also an important mentor for innovation scholars like Giovanni Dosi, Keith Pavitt, and Jan Fagerberg.
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“De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum”?
| Nicolai Foss |
History of econ nerds (wonks?) will know that John Stuart Mill was trained by his father (James Mill) from the age of three in the Greek and Latin languages. Since Mill, economists’ Latin capabilities have deteriorated rather badly (a result of the dominance of Greek notation? ;-)). In fact, most economists only know two Latin sentences (or rather, dicta) that, however, they love to blurt out, often with a smug smile. One is a sound analytical principle, namely the ceteris paribus principle. The other is a much more problematic (if applied outside of economics) claim, made famous to economists by George Stigler and Gary Becker, namely “de gustibus non est disputandum.”
I have always been surprised by the readiness of many economists to endorse this claim as a general claim that goes beyond the simple implication that in economics we take preferences as given and applies on the aesthetic domain (perhaps this simply reflects the fact that many people nowadays subscribe to total or near-total relativism in aesthetics). However, understood as an aesthetic claim, “de gustibus non est disputandum” lies entirely outside of the orbit of economics (and economists-as-economists should shut up), and is emphatically not implied by subjective value theory, or any related branch of subjectivism in economics. (more…)
Pomo Periscope XX: Thomas Basbøll vs. Karl Weick
| Nicolai Foss |
Karl Weick may not really qualify as a bona fide pomo. He writes well and clearly and much of his work is quite in the mainstream of management research. Still, he has written about the favorite pomo notion of reflexivity (e.g., here), his authority is often invoked in prominent pomo tracts in management (e.g., here), and his notion of sensemaking has a distinct pomo connotation.
Weick’s work has recently been subject to close examination by my CBS colleague, Thomas Basbøll. In a recently published paper, “Softly Constrained Imagination: Plagiarism and Misprision in the Theory of Organizational Sensemaking,” Basbøll argues that Weick’s work suffers from “significant instances of plagiarism and misreading” (p. 164). Wow! Here is the abstract:
While Karl Weick’s writings have been very influential in contemporary work on organizations, his scholarship is rarely subjected to critical scrutiny. Indeed, despite its open ‘breaching’ of the conventions of much academic writing, Weick’s work has been widely celebrated as ‘first-rate scholarship.’ As it turns out, however, his ‘softly constrained’ textual practices are rendered doubtful by both misreading and plagiarism, which makes his work resemble ‘poetry’ in a much stronger sense than perhaps originally intended. This paper draws inspiration from literary theory to analyze three cases of questionable scholarship in Weick’s 1995 book Sensemaking in organizations, framing them in the context of standard formulations of the methodology of sensemaking drawn from the literature. It concludes that we need to rethink our tolerance of the sensemaking style and re-affirm a commitment to more traditional academic constraints.
Here is Weick’s reply. And here is Thomas’s reply to the reply.
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Management Journal Impact Factors 2009
| Nicolai Foss |
Eugene Garfield may not exactly be defunct, but it is entirely tr
ue that practical men, such as university presidents, deans, and department heads, are slaves of the Science Citation Index he created. In fact, so are the rest of us who have eagerly been waiting for the publication of the impact factors for 2009. They have just arrived and it is fascinating stuff. Here are a few immediate observations on the management IFs:
- Abstracting from MIS Quarterly, the Strategic Management Journal is #3.
- Journal of Management is, at #5 (and #4 if MIS Q is left out) cementing its position as a top journal.
- Strategic Organization is up on #8! Way to go, Joel and colleagues! But can you sustain that position?
- Journal of International Business Studies has dropped a few positions but is still in the top-10.
- Journal of Management Studies (#14) has emerged as a close competitior in terms of ranking to Organization Science (#12). It is the undisputed #1 Euro management journal (it has also just entered the Financial Times ranking).
- Resarch Policy, which was among the top 10 only two years back, is now #22.
- Management Science is now down to #24. There are management departmetns where this journal is considered A+.
Of course, we all know the many reasons why all this should be taken with more than the proverbial grain of salt. For example, as Ram Mudambi points out (personal conversation), more and more journals play the impact factor game and force authors to cite recent papers in the journals, and reference lists grow longer and longer. Perhaps Article Influence Scores represent the superior alternative.
Norway Workshop on Org Econ and Org Capabilities
| Nicolai Foss |
With Nick Argyres, Teppo Felin, and Todd Zenger, I am editing a special issue of Organization Science on “Organizational Capabilities and Organizational Economics: From Opposition and Complementarity to Real Integration.” We received 84 submissions and invited a fair amount of R&Rs. To help improve those R&Rs and to stimulate discussed, we organized, with the (practical) help of Professor Sven Haugland and (financial help) the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, a small workshop that took place this Friday and Saturday (28-29 May) at the magnificent Hotel Solstrand, outside of Bergen. The discussions were informative, high-level, and friendly; the weather behaved (Bergen is the most rainy city in Europe); the food was excellent; etc. A model workshop, in short.
A few key points (I will refrain from commenting on the R&R papers):
- Out of 11 papers, 1 was theoretical, 2 were simulation papers, and the rest were empirical. All creatively brought both capabilities and OE ideas to bear on issues of economic organization (including internal organization).
- I argued that virtually all debate on capabilities and economic organization had been dominated by a “capabilities first” heuristic, in which capabilities are primary and transaction costs were, as it were, second-order (e.g., transaction costs moderate the relation between capabilities and vertical scope). It is time to reverse causality and examine how capabilities emerge from “transacting.”
- Nick Argyres and Todd Zenger presented a paper that followed up on this by showing how capabilities can be understood as reflecting specific investments.
- Nevertheless, there was some skepticism regarding whether it is useful to talk about a debate, not just because of the dominance of the capabilities view in that debate, but also because it was better to consider problems “agnostically” and choose flexibly among the available tools, whether drawn from the capabilities or the TCE toolbox. Michael Jacobides argued this point with so much passion that everyone cracked up when Teppo Felin observed that Michael was more of a high-priest than an agnostic.
- “OE” was generally interpreted as “transaction cost economics”; not a single paper brought agency and property rights issues to bear on these issues.
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The Unbearable Lightness of Economics (?)
| Nicolai Foss |
The always-helpful Peter suggested “a quick-and-easy Foss blog post,” specifically a post on what sounds like an interesting conference on “Economics Made Fun in the Face of the Economic Crisis,” organized by Jack Vromen and N.E. Aydinonat, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, 10-11 December 2010. The Call builds up a tension between the emerging econ-made-fun genre (Levitt, Cowen et al.) with its implied view of econ as a universal tool for understanding behaviors and their implications, and the claimed inability of econ to come to grips with the current crisis. You may think what you like of this claimed tension, but Jack Vromen always represents quality, and with keynote speakers like Diana Coyle, Robert Frank, and Ariel Rubinstein, this conference will be fun.
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The Role of Assumptions in Management Research
| Nicolai Foss |
A striking difference between economics and (most) management research is that while economists are obsessed with the role of assumptions in theorizing, management scholars as a rule don’t seem to spend much time on assumptions, at best tucking them away under “boundary conditions,” and, in general, having rather little patience with “assumptions discussions.” In particular, the eyes of management scholars of the more descriptive (“phenomenological”) stripe glaze over from boredom or inattention when the issue is raised.
Major economists (Samuelson and Friedman come immediately to mind) have written famous methodological papers on assumptions. A significant portion of what passes as “economic methodology” is taken up with the nature and status of assumptions. Prominent philosophers have written on the role of assumptions in economics (e.g., Alan Musgrave, Daniel Hausman). However, I know of not a single paper in management research dedicated to the issue. (more…)
Strategic Entrepreneurship Conference at CBS
| Nicolai Foss |
As many O&M readers will know, “strategic entrepreneurship” has emerged as an exciting new research field in the intersection of, well, strategic management and entrepreneurship. In a very broad (perhaps too broad) reading, the field is taken up with explaining the emergence of essentially entrepreneurial acts of those competitive advantages that are so central to the strategic management field. In recognition of the very close links between the strategic entrepreneurship field and the strategic management field, the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal was established in 2007 as a sister journal to the Strategic Management Journal.
However, like many other macro management fields, strategic entrepreneurship pays rather little attention to the micro-foundations of the explanation of its macro explanandum, firm-level entrepreneurship. Moreover, the influence of formal structure and organizational control on the discovery, evaluation and implementation of opportunities at the firm level has been remarkably under-researched.
To meet these challenges, I have arranged, assisted by my two highly able PhD students, Stefan Linder and Jacob Lyngsie, a conference, “Strategic Entrepreneurship: Bringing Organization Design and Micro-foundations Into the Field,” to take place at the Copenhagen Business School, 11-12 November 11-12 2010. Keynote speakers include such luminaries as Jeff Hornsby, Bill Schulze, Mike Wright and Shaker Zahra. Peter Klein fans will be pleased to be informed that it is quite likely that he will participate!
Here is the — still quite preliminary — conference site. Submit a paper!
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Strategy Making and PowerPoint
| Nicolai Foss |
We have blogged more than two dozen times on PowerPoint (here) and at least as many times on pomo (here), never realizing that the two themes are connected. In a recent paper, “Strategy and PowerPoint: An Inquiry into the Epistemic Culture and Machinery of Strategy Making” (forthcoming in Organization Science), the ever-interesting Sarah Kaplan poses the question, “How is PowerPoint engaged in the discursive practices that make up the epistemic culture of strategy making?”
Yes, this does smack of hardcore pomo, and would prima facie seem to be up for hard lashing under the O&M rubric of “Pomo Periscope.” However, upon reading, it turns out that this is highly reasonable, well executed, and meaningful pomo. In a nutshell, Sarah argues that PP is a privileged strategy-making support tool, and that it may usefully be analyzed as a genre. And it matters to strategy making, as suggested in this key passage in the paper:
I show how the affordances of PowerPoint enabled the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in a highly uncertain environment, creating a space for discussion, making combinations and recombinations possible, allowing for rapid adjustments as ideas evolved and providing access to a wide range of actors, no matter how dispersed over space or time. Yet, I found, these affordances also supported cartographic efforts to draw boundaries around the scope of a strategy, certifying certain ideas and not others, and allowing document owners to include or exclude certain slides or participants and control access to information. Cartography in the world of ideas is similar to cartography of the physical landscape: drawing maps and defining boundaries help people navigate otherwise uncertain terrain. These collaborative and cartographic practices shaped the strategic choices and actions taken in the organization.
Why Are the Dutch So Clean?
| Nicolai Foss |
Folk wisdom holds that people stopped bathing after the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, it is commonly held that all of Europe was, until recently, quite smelly indeed. Some hold the view that this is still the case.
There were serious exceptions, of course. I cannot resist mentioning a particularly well taken example, reported by the prior of St. Fridswides, John of Wallingford, “who complained bitterly that the Danes bathed once a week, combed their hair regularly, and changed their clothes regularly. The result was that English women were easily seduced by the nice-smelling Danes” (here).
A perhaps better-known example of European cleanliness is that of the Dutch. It is also the most seriously researched example. In the 17th and 18th century, visitors to Holland wondered about Dutch cleanliness, indeed, obsession with hygiene. Some have argued that this, somehow, reflected Dutch Calvinism. No, argue Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderblom in “The Economic Origins of Cleanliness in the Dutch Golden Age,” the reason is . . . butter! And here is the explanation (Abstract):
This paper explores why early modern Holland, and particularly its women, had an international reputation for cleanliness. We argue that economic factors were crucially important in shaping this habit. Between 1500 and 1800 numerous travellers reported on the habit housewives and maids had of meticulously cleaning the interior and exterior of their houses. We argue that it was the commercialization of dairy farming that led to improvements in household hygiene. In the fourteenth century peasants as well as urban dwellers began to produce large quantities of butter and cheese for the market. In their small production units women, and their daughters, worked to secure a clean environment for proper curdling and churning. We estimate that, at the turn of the sixteenth century, half of all rural households and up to one third of urban households in Holland produced butter and cheese. These numbers declined in the sixteenth century as peasants sold their land and larger farms were set up. Initially the migration of entire peasant families to towns, the hiring of farmers’ daughters as housemaids, and the exceptionally high consumption of dairy products continued to encourage the habit of regular cleaning in urban households. However, by the mid-seventeenth century the direct link between dairy farming and cleanliness was, for the most part, lost.
Assessing the Critiques of the RBV
| Nicolai Foss |
There is little doubt that the resource-based view, in its various guises and manifestations (e.g., see Gavetti & Levinthal’s distinction between “high church” and “low church” approaches to the RBV), is the dominant perspective in strategic management research. Naturally, all dominant approaches attract critique like flies. This is amplified by the fact that the RBV is still evolving; many things have been unclear (e.g., what exactly is assumed about managerial rationality, the game forms that describe strategic factor markets, the interaction (if any) between factor market and product market behaviors, etc.), and those things that have been reasonably clear (e.g., the RBV’s reliance on competitive equilibrium models) have been controversial. Some of the critiques of the RBV are fairly well-known, for example, the Priem and Butler tautology charge, while other critiques are less generally known.
Given that many of the critiques have basically been around for two decades or more, it is surprising that the first comprehensive treatment of the many critiques of the RBV has just been published — namely Kraaijenbrink, Spender, and Groen’s “The Resource-based View: A Review and Assessment of Its Critiques.” (more…)
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