Posts filed under ‘Conferences’
Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory and Research
| Peter Klein |
The 2016 Business History Conference, later this month in Portland, Oregon, features an interesting pre-conference paper development workshop on “Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory and Research.”
In recent years, both business historians and entrepreneurship scholars have grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources, methods and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including in accounting for contexts and institutions, in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic change, in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process and in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time.
The papers are targeted for a special issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. Here is the lineup, with many items likely to interest O&M readers.
Entrepreneurial Opportunity: The Oxygen or Phlogiston of Entrepreneurship Research?
| Peter Klein |
Don’t miss this PDW at the upcoming Academy of Management conference in Vancouver. From organizer Per Davidssson:
I just wanted to bring your attention to a PDW I am organizing for the upcoming AoM meeting, where we will engage in frank and in-depth discussions about the problems and merits of the popular notion of “entrepreneurial opportunity”. We have been fortunate to gather a collection of very strong scholars and independent thinkers as presenters and discussants in this PDW: Richard J. Arend, Dimo Dimov, Denis Grégoire, Peter G. Klein, Moren Lévesque, Saras Sarasvathy, and Matthew Wood. . This illustrious group of colleagues will make sure the deliberations do not focus on a “beauty contest” between “discovery” and “creation” views but instead reach beyond limitations of both.
I encourage you to join us for this session, and to make absolutely sure I won’t send you to the wrong place at the right time I have copied the details straight from the online program:
Title: Entrepreneurial Opportunity: The Oxygen or Phlogiston of Entrepreneurship Research? (session #365)
Date & Time: Saturday, August 08, 2015, 12:30:00 PM – 3:00:00 PM
Hotel & Room: Vancouver Convention Centre, Room 012
Further elaboration follows below. Heartily welcome!
ISNIE is now SIOE
| Peter Klein |
I’ve long been involved with the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE). (In fact, I first met the esteemed Professor Foss at the inaugural ISNIE conference in St. Louis in 1997.) ISNIE was established as an global academic society promoting the study of institutions within the broad tradition established by the organization’s co-founders Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North. ISNIE has been a great success, holding annual conferences in the US and Europe, sponsoring an important working-paper series, and boasting thousands of members from all over the world.
Times change, and over the last two decades the study of institutions has moved from the periphery towards the center of economic, social, political, and legal analysis. The statement, “institutions matter,” which might have been controversial in social science in the 1990s, seems trite today. As such, some of ISNIE’s leaders and members saw a need to reposition and rebrand the society to reflect the current academic and policy climate. Last year ISNIE’s members voted, and this year the board approved, a name change. The organization is now SIOE, the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Along with the change is a new website, featuring news, information, a blog, and many other features. The site is a work in progress and editors Bruno Chaves and Jens Prüfer would be happy to receive comments and suggestions.
I’m looking forward to the next twenty years with SIOE!
Video from Coase Conference
| Peter Klein |
Last weekend the Ronald Coase Institute held a conference, “The Next Generation of Discovery: Research and Policy Change Inspired by Ronald Coase.” The impressive lineup featured Kenneth Arrow, Oliver Williamson, Gary Libecap, Sam Peltzman, John Nye, Claude Menard, Ning Wang, Lee and Alexandra Benham, Mary Shirley, and many others. The Institute has now made both days of the program available on video. Great stuff.
Photo courtesy of John Nye.
O&M in South America
| Peter Klein |
I hope to see O&M readers and friends at next week’s SMS Special Conference in Santiago, “From Local Voids to Local Goods: Can Institutions Promote Competitive Advantage?” The conference focuses on the relationships among institutions, firm strategy, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Besides the usual paper and paper-development sessions, Tarun Khanna’s keynote and several plenary sessions should be of special interest to O&Mers.
Before heading to Santiago I will be giving talks in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo sponsored by Mises Brasil, to celebrate a new Portuguese translation of my 2010 book The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur, as well as visiting my friends and colleagues at Insper, which among other activities is starting a doctoral program in business administration.
O&M is popular in Latin America. Nicolai and I are both on the advisory board of CORS and have given the CORS lecture; Nicolai was at USP last month to give a PhD course in strategy and organization.
Upcoming Workshops, Seminars, and Events
| Peter Klein |
Some upcoming events of interest to O&M readers:
- “Research and Policy Change Inspired by Ronald Coase,” 27-28 March 2015, Washington DC
- Berkeley-Paris Organizational Economics Workshop, 10-11 April 2015, Paris
- BHC/EBHA Workshop Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research, 24 June 2015, Miami FL
- TILEC Economic Governance Workshop, “Economic Governance and Social Preferences,” 3-4 September 2015, Tilburg
HOPE Launch Event
| Nicolai Foss |
This Wednesday, 22 October 2014, is the Launch event for the CBS research program I co-direct with Anders Sørensen, “Human Capital, Organization Design, and Corporate Performance” (HOPE). The program includes Ed Lazear, Kathryn Shaw, Ben Campbell, and David Ross. HOPE is about organizational structure and productivity:
Many of the European economies suffer from sluggish productivity growth. Firms matter strongly to economic growth. However, the understanding of firm performance has many gaps — particularly concerning the role for performance of human resources, organizational design, and their interaction.
The scientific ambition of HOPE is to address these gaps based on an interdisciplinary approach, intensively cooperating with some of the world’s leading researchers in the fields that inform this proposal, and by making use of the state-of-the-art econometric methods, and high-quality register and survey data. HOPE will enter a still sparsely populated but highly important field, and will place CBS centrally in the international discussion of the causes of firm performance, such as firm-level productivity.
HOPE is a joint venture between Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, and Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School
Hope you can join us!
SMS Special Conference, “From Local Voids to Local Goods: Can Institutions Promote Competitive Advantage?”
| Peter Klein |
Please consider submitting a proposal to the upcoming SMS Special Conference in Santiago, Chile, 19-21 March 2015, on the theme “From Local Voids to Local Goods: Can Institutions Promote Competitive Advantage?” Here’s the description:
A recent stream of strategy research has examined how institutional voids pose fundamental challenges for industrial development in emerging markets, which bring detrimental effects to the competitiveness of local firms. Yet, in many countries, policymakers, to various degrees and levels, have adopted a rather positive agenda, to try and foster local firms through the provision of public resources, such as investments in infrastructure, specialized industrial policies, as well as knowledge-generation systems. Concomitantly, firms themselves have pursued collective synergies that individual firms alone would be able to attain. In sum, strategies embedded in the local environment may promote rather than limit competitive advantage. To advance this discussion, we are gathering a group of established scholars and practitioners in Santiago, one of the most modern Latin American cities. Chile is also well known for its distinctive institutional reforms, which promote a thriving business climate. The Conference will thus offer a unique opportunity to discuss how firms and institutions interact to spur entrepreneurship and development.
I am chairing the track on “Institutions and Local Entrepreneurship,” and looking for papers dealing broadly with the relationships among legal, political, and social institutions, entrepreneurship (broadly defined), public policy, and economic performance. I would love to see submissions from O&Mers. The submission deadline (extended abstract, not full paper) is 15 October 2014, just around the corner. Let me know if you have any questions.
The WINIR Greenwich Conference
| Dick Langlois |
I write on the flight back from the inaugural conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR), which met on the Prime Meridian these last few days. The conference was a great success, not only for its wonderful location in the Old Royal Naval College astride the Cutty Sark but also for the overall quality of the organization and the presentations.
As I have mentioned before, WINIR was created to encourage institutional research from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. The annual conference institutionalizes this (you might say) by having keynote speakers from five different disciplines. The political scientist was Kathleen Thelen from MIT, one of my fellow editors on the Journal of Institutional Economics; the legal scholar was Katharina Pistor from Columbia; and the sociologist was Geoffrey Ingham from Cambridge, who made some interesting observations about Chinese institutions in the context of the “great divergence” debate in economic history. Serious and well-known scholars all. The economist was Timur Kuran, who updated us on his fascinating work on the economics of the pre-nineteenth-century Islamic waqf. But the most interesting – or at any rate most surprising – keynote was the philosopher Barry Smith from Buffalo, whom some of you may have heard of for his early work on the philosophy of Austrian economics. Smith’s talk was about “ontology,” which in my ignorance I had expected to be an hour of head-breaking essentialism. It turns out that “ontology” now means the practice of classification – giving things the right names and putting them in the right boxes. As much computer science as philosophy, it seemed to me. The main applications are in databases and sciences more generally, including things like Department of Defense databases and Human Genome data. Smith is a world-leading practitioner of this kind of ontology, having founded something called the National Center for Ontological Research. (I must confess that the first thing that popped into my mind when I heard this title was the High-Energy Magic Building at Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University.) Basically, ontology appears to be about modularization and standardization, something quite fitting to talk about in the shadow of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. I discovered that Smith was unaware of the modularity literature, so I plan to send him some references.
Many of the parallel sessions were also of high quality. I could attend only a fraction of them (what with sneaking out to visit the longitude exhibit at the National Maritime Museum). But let me plug a couple of papers by my friends. Giampaolo Garzarelli and Lyndal Keeton modeled “internal exit” in pre-colonial Southern Africa, the fissioning off of subtribal groups to found new polities. (I was impressed with the quality of that entire session.) As I was chairing a competing session later, I missed Roger Koppl and Caryn Devin talking about their paper “Against Design,” written with Stuart Kauffman and Teppo Felin. A version of that collaboration will appear in JOIE as a target article with solicited comments. (more…)
SMS Teaching Workshop: Impact of New Technologies on Teaching and Higher Education
| Peter Klein |
Along with 
Gonçalo Pacheco de Almeida I am chairing the Competitive Strategy Interest Group Teaching Workshop at the upcoming Strategic Management Society conference in Madrid. The workshop is Saturday, 20 September 2014, 1:00-4:00pm at the main conference venue, the NH Eurobuilding, Paris Room. Our theme is “The Impact of New Technologies on Teaching and Higher Education” and we have an all-star lineup featuring Bharat Anand (Harvard), Peter Zemsky (INSEAD), Michael Leiblein (Ohio State), Michael Lenox (University of Virginia), Frank Rothaermel (Georgia Tech), Vivek Goel (Chief Academic Strategist at Coursera), and Andrea Martin (President of IBM Academy of Technology).
Background: The higher-education industry is abuzz with talk about MOOCs, distance learning, computer-based instruction, and other pedagogical innovations. Many of you are already using online exercises and assessments, simulations, and other activities in the classroom. How are these innovations best incorporated into the business curriculum, at the BBA, MBA, EMBA, and PhD levels? What can business scholars, say about the impact of these technologies on higher education more generally? Are they sustaining or disruptive innovations, and what do they imply for the structure of the business school, and the university itself?
The plan for this session is to discuss how leading companies and business schools are (a) driving innovation in the Higher Education teaching space, (b) thinking about the business model of virtual education (MOOCs, social learning, etc.), and (c) testing some of the assumptions behind globalization in the education industry.
The full schedule is below the fold. Additional information about the workshop, and the SMS itself, is available at the conference website.
If you’re coming to SMS this year, please plan to join us for the workshop. Pre-registration is encouraged but not required. If you’re planning to attend, please let us know by sending an email to csig.teaching2014@gmail.com. Feel free to email Gonçalo or myself at the same address with questions or comments. (more…)
New ISNIE Awards
| Peter Klein |
The International Society for New Institutional Economics has established four new awards, named after the pioneers of new institutional social science: the Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award, Oliver Williamson Best Conference Paper Award, Douglass North Best Paper or Book Award, and Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award. Details on the awards, and a call for nominations for the Coase, North, and Ostrom awards, are on the ISNIE site. (Sadly, my suggestion for a Best Organizational and Institutional Economics Blog Award was not heeded.)
WINIR Conference in Greenwich: Deadline Approaching
| Dick Langlois |
February 28 is the deadline for submitting an abstract to the first conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR), which will take place 11-14 September 2014 at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Keynote speakers include Timur Kuran. Information and abstract submission at the WINIR website.
ISNIE Session at ASSA 2014
| Peter Klein |
Those of you attending this weekend’s ASSA meeting in Philadelphia may want to catch a great session sponsored by ISNIE and titled “The Economic Institutions of Higher Education.” I am presenting along with Henry Manne and Sarah Smith; Scott Masten is chairing and discussants are Bob Gibbons, Henry Hansmann, and Jeff Furman. The session is Saturday, January 4 at 2:30pm in the Philadelphia Marriott, Grand Ballroom, Salon L
ISNIE 2014
| Peter Klein |
The ISNIE 2014 Call for Papers is now available. The conference is at Duke University, 19-21 June 2014, home of President-Elect and Program Committee Chair John de Figueiredo. Bob Gibbons and Timur Kuran are keynote speakers. ISNIE is one of our favorite conferences, so please consider submitting a proposal! Submissions are due 30 January 2014.
SMS Special Conference on Microfoundations
| Nicolai Foss |
So, with Torben Pedersen, Bocconi University, I am arranging a Strategic Management Society “Special Conference” (so-called) on “Microfoundations in Strategic Management Research: Embracing Individuals” next year in Copenhagen. Specifically, the conference takes place from the 13. to the 15. of June at the Copenhagen Business School. (The DRUID conference starts on June 16). Pretty good lineup, I dare say, with keynotes by Ron Burt, Richard Rumelt and Ernst Fehr and several luminaries in the panels.
Here is a little presentation video on the conference. Here is the conference site.
The deadline for paper proposals (5 pp + 2 pp refs) is December 5. Submit a proposal!
Ronald Coase at Dundee
| Peter Klein |
The University of Dundee’s Scottish Centre for Economic Methodology is hosting a conference 18 November 2013, “Origins of the Theory of the Firm: Ronald Coase at Dundee, 1932-1934.” The program looks really interesting:
- Keith Tribe, “Dundee and Interwar Commercial Education.”
- Billy Kenefick, “‘A great industrial cul-de-sac, a grim monument to “man’s inhumanity to man.” ‘ Dundee by the early 1930s.”
- Carlo Morelli, “Market & Non-Market Co-ordination: Dundee and its Jute Industry – The Case Study for Ronald Coase?”
- David Campbell, “Agency, Authority and Co-operation in the Firm: Coase, Macneil, Marx.”
- Alice Belcher, “Coase and the Concept of Direction: How Valuable are Legal Concepts in the Theory of the Firm?”
- Brian Loasby, “Ronald Coase’s Theory of the Firm and the Scope of Economics.”
- Alistair Dow & Sheila Dow, “Coase and Scottish Political Economy.”
- Eyup Ozveren & Ilhan Can Ozen, “Coase versus Coase: What if the Market Were One Big Firm Instead?”
- Neil Kay, “Coase, The Nature of the Firm, and the Principles of Marginal Analysis.”
World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research
| Dick Langlois |
I have recently become involved with a new organization that many readers may be interested in. It’s called the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR). From the website:
WINIR is a specialist but global network. It is set up to complement rather than rival other organisations that have the study of institutions on their agenda. Unconfined to any single academic discipline, it accepts contributions from any approach that can help us understand the nature and role of institutions. While other organisations are intended to act as broad forums for all kinds of research in the social sciences, WINIR aims to build an adaptable and interdisciplinary theoretical consensus concerning core issues, which can be a basis for cumulative learning and scientific progress in the exciting and rapidly-expanding area of institutional research.
You can learn more and sign up here. If you join now, you will be considered a founding member. WINIR is tentatively planning a conference for next year near London and one the year after that in Rio.
On Academic Writing
| Peter Klein |
The Strategic Management Society’s annual conference wrapped up yesterday. It was an excellent event with many fine papers, panels, workshops, and entertainments. We’ll be posting more about the substance of the conference in the coming days. However, I want to mention today a small gripe, not about the conference, but about the strategic management literature more generally. This is something that struck me in particular during the conference. Specifically, there is too much bad writing. The strategic management field is becoming as bad as some of the humanities — maybe even sociology — in its use of pretentious, clumsy, and awkward words and phrases. You can see this most easily in the paper titles: “An Analysis of the Effects of Intra-Firm Group Identity and Power Imbalance on the Deployment of Collaborative Teams in the North Waziristani Ball-Bearing Industry, 1992-2005.” OK, I made that one up, but it gives you the flavor. I’m reminded of Orwell’s example:
Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern [1946] English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
I’m pretty sure the latter version appeared in the abstract of a recent SMJ paper!
SMS Teaching Workshop on Technology and the Future of Higher Education
| Peter Klein |
Tunji Adebesan and I are organizing the second annual teaching workshop for the Strategic Management Society’s Competitive Strategy Interest Group. The workshop is Saturday, September 28, 2:00-5:00pm, part of the upcoming SMS Conference in Atlanta. It’s open to emerging and established scholars in strategic management, organization, and entrepreneurship, or a related field.
This year’s theme is technological innovation and its impact on teaching strategy. The higher-education industry is abuzz with talk about MOOCs, distance learning, computer-based instruction, and other pedagogical innovations. Many of you are already using online exercises and assessments, simulations, and other activities in the classroom. How are these innovations best incorporated into the strategy curriculum? What can strategy scholars say about the impact of these technologies on higher education more generally? Are they sustaining or disruptive innovations, and what do they imply for the structure of the business school, and the university itself?
The interactive, participatory workshop begins with a panel session featuring experts on distance learning, online assessments, simulations, electronic textbooks, social media, and more. Panelists include Michael Leiblein (Ohio State), Jackson Nickerson (Washington University, St. Louis), Frank Rothaermel (Georgia Tech), and Bob Wiseman (Michigan State), along with Tunji and myself. Sample questions: Are MOOCs the future of higher education? Do they work? Can What are best practices for distance learning, and for incorporating online activities into the traditional classroom? Do improved distance-learning and collaboration tools facilitate new models for executive education and corporate training programs? How should strategy teachers make best use of social media, TED talks and other media, iPads, and other tools and apps, especially for younger students? Following the panel session, participants will break into small groups for in-depth discussion and practice using new tools. After regrouping, participants will discuss about what these innovations mean for the higher-education industry, and business schools in particular.
Pre-registration is encouraged but not required. If you’re planning to attend, please let us know by sending an email to csig.teaching2013@gmail.com so we can plan accordingly. Feel free to email me with questions or comments.
AoM Miscellany
| Peter Klein |
This week’s Academy of Management conference was fun and interesting, if overwhelming (over 12,000 nerds graced the Disney World resort hotels with their presence). A few post-conference links, thoughts, etc.
- Twitter was a big deal. Check out the #AOM2013 hashtag for the stream. There was even an officially sponsored Tweet Up. I enjoyed playing along (as @petergklein) but am not totally clear how such a tool is best used during a conference.
- I really enjoyed a Saturday morning session on “Opportunities: The State of the Debate” with me, Sharon Alvarez, Jay Barney, Dimo Dimov, Mike Wright, Devereaux Jennings, and Roy Suddaby. I was the odd man out, giving my usual shtick about how the concept of “opportunities” should be eliminated altogether — perhaps a bit cheeky given the session title, but YOLO, right? (My slides are here, though they make less sense without the accompanying patter.) Jay Barney started the session by stating that all the panelists, except me, agree that opportunities should be the unit of analysis in entrepreneurship research but that opportunities should not (necessarily) be regarded as “discovered,” but also created. By the end of the session, it seemed that all but one panelist rejected the discovery concept altogether, and most grudgingly admitted that maybe we could talk about entrepreneurs creating products and services, rather than creating “opportunities.” Anyway, a good time was had by all.
- There were lots of other interesting sessions, too many to mention. Some have already been described below. The session on “Myths and Realities of Capitalism” was particularly, well, controversial.
- Here’s a report on a session (that I missed) on translating research results into practice by engaging the media (via Dave Ketchen).
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